Screenwriter Alan Ball talks death, TV and beta-blockers, writes Kylie Northover.
WHEN you create a TV series built entirely around the central premise of death, you're asking to be forever after referred to as ''death obsessed'' - but it's a tag that screenwriter Alan Ball, writer of the funeral home-set Six Feet Under and True Blood, rejects.
''I don't know that I'm obsessed with it; I don't think about it every day. I think we all definitely think about it, we're all aware of it,'' he says.
But even Ball's appearance at the Wheeler Centre this weekend is billed as a discussion of his ''ongoing preoccupation with death and suburban America''.
When he was 13, he was in a car accident with his sister - she was driving - and she died in front of him.