TV Reviews : Eternal Youth Pursued on ‘Never Say Die’

“Never Say Die: The Pursuit of Eternal Youth,” a segment of “America Undercover” airing on HBO at 9:30 tonight, asks as its premise that age-old question: What price vanity?

The answer, in this engaging hour from writer-producer-director-narrator-interviewer Antony Thomas, is billions and billions of shekels. It seems large numbers of people in the industrialized nations will spend just about anything to stave off the aging process.

This survey of human fears and obsessions ranges from the legitimate to the, well, less legitimate, from plastic surgery to the Eternal Flame Foundation, a group convinced that mind over matter will enable them to live forever, from government research into the molecular basis of aging to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Riverside, where $35,000 gets your head frozen for future reanimation, $100,000 your entire body.

“Never Say Die” is full of compelling images: the naked spa-goers at Baden Baden, Germany; the Sun City, Ariz., cheerleading squad whose average age is 73; the infomercial with L.A.’s Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, “Life Extension” authors who tout a regimen of megavitamins and supplements and who look unhealthy enough to make you want to toss that bottle of One-a-Days out the window as soon as the show is over.

Some segments are voyeuristic enough to make you squirm. The look at a woman undergoing cosmetic plastic surgery is not for the squeamish; the one on a man who has frozen his wife’s head is poignant and irritating--a neat trick.

“Never Say Die” handles all the big ethical, social, philosophical and religious questions in a straightforward though lightweight fashion. It’s an enjoyable, thought-provoking look at a peculiar 20th-Century fixation.