Death Unexplained, BBC Two: a coroner's verdict Clearly this age-old profession, shrouded in more mystery than an unidentified body in the Fulham mortuary, is full of suprises and misconceptions. "I suppose if, socially, you mention you're a coroner, people think that you're a pathologist, getting your hands dirty with dissections - or they think you're a funeral director," she admits. Then again, most of us rely on popular shows such as Quincy, CSI and Waking the Dead for our information. "Yes, I've seen Silent Witness - the coroners are usually pretty stern, aren't they?" she says. I'd like to think we're not like that. Thompson was working as a district judge in Hong Kong when she stumbled into her current occupation - as she tells it, the chief magistrate threw her the coroner's manual to study one weekend as nobody was available to sit in court the following week. Her work has now taken her all over the world, including a year in the Falklands where she once declared the colourful verdict of death by southern giant petrel - one of the seabirds had attacked an Asian trawlerman, who'd jumped ship in an effort to swim to British soil. That led to some unusual forensic work: "He was found with a huge gash on his neck, so we sent the bird's jaws off to the labs for comparison with the injury." Closer to home, the first episode of Death Unexplained contains a suspected poisoning and a possible drug overdose; both of them real-life mysteries no right-minded fictional coroner would turn down. Another episode mentions last year's earthquake in New Zealand. The programme uses the disaster as an example of how, in such instances, families can endure tortuous waits for forensics teams to confirm the identities of dead bodies. Thompson points out such calamities can also throw up some unexpected twists: "You do come across people faking their own deaths. We hear of people throwing their identity documents into the wreckage so they can get away from their marriages or debts and start again. It certainly sounds easier than jumping off a hospital roof, Sherlock-style. But as Death Unexpected makes clear, this line of work is not all rushing around solving mysterious crimes. Though the situations are often extraordinary, the people involved are no quixotic caricatures, and the raw trauma of ubiquitous death does take its toll - acute moments captured by the programme include a family trying to understand why their loved one took his own life and a concerned neighbour making the effort to attend the empty funeral of a reclusive old man. "Meeting the families face-to-face at inquest is the hardest part for me," Thompson says. That's the first time I realise that the case I've been dealing with has a family attached. But if you're going to do an inquest properly, you've got to give something of yourself emotionally to it. It's altogether clear why a cathartic outlet such as dancing is necessary. My secret ambition is to be on Strictly Come Dancing. They always have an older woman who gets knocked out before the final, don't they? It's certainly harder to imagine Quincy doing the Cha-Cha-Cha. Death Unexplained starts on BBC Two on Tuesday 7 February at 10.35pm (NI/Wales, 11.05pm; Scotland, 11.35pm)