I've now listened to the whole thing, and I have to correct myself, only half of the people on it were raving idiot lunatics: two of the four panellists (and one was a columnist for the Daily Mail, for which this is a job requirement), and two of the four witnesses.
The format of the programme is that the four panellists each make a position statement, the four witnesses are questioned one by one by the panel, and finally the panel discusses the issue. The panel statements were alternately pro-longevity, anti, pro, and anti; likewise the four witnesses.
Most of the pro-death arguments took a strange form which I've noticed a lot of times in many contexts. You have a concept which actually consists of a number of concepts which empirically are generally all found together, or imagined to be. For example, the concept of being "old" includes:
A. Being over 80.
B. Being infirm.
C. Looking old.
D. Succumbing to diseases.
E. Being wise with experience.
F. Being soon to die.
G. Being unproductive.
Then you can construct all sort of arguments that reduce to taking the contingent correlations among these to be logical necessities. In the programme I heard all of these:
Old people are wise. Old people get diseases. So if you try to prevent those diseases, you aren't valuing their wisdom.
Old people are over 80. Old people have wrinkles. Therefore if you remove the wrinkles, you're pretending they're 25 years old.
People over 80 are infirm. Therefore if you extend life to 150, you're extending years of infirmity.
Anyone over 80 is soon to die. Therefore if you allow them to live longer, you'll have to arrange some other way for them to die.
The wisdom of age is good. Therefore old age is good. Therefore being soon to die of it is good.
Old people are unproductive. Therefore prolonging their lifespan means more years of unproductivity -- who will provide the resources they consume?
Teh stupid, indeed. On top of that, all the speakers against longevity talked about extended lifespan being "unnatural", and displayed a complete lack of imagination or even five minutes effort in thinking about the practical consequences of longevity.
Last Wednesday (2010 Dec 01), BBC Radio 4 broadcast a studio discussion on the question: "should we actively try to extend life itself?" The programme can be listened to from the BBC here for one week from broadcast, and is also being repeated tomorrow (Saturday Dec 04) at 22:15 BST. (ETA: not BST, GMT.)
All of the dreadful arguments for why death is good came out. For uninteresting reasons I missed a few minutes here and there, but in what I heard, not one of the speakers on any side of the question said anything like, "This is a no-brainer! Death is evil. Disease is evil. The less of both we have, the better. There is nothing good about death, at all, and all the arguments to the contrary are moral imbecility."
Instead, I heard people saying that work on life extension is disrespectful to the old, that to prolong life would be like prolonging an opera, which has a certain natural size and shape, that the old are wise, so if we make them physically young then old people won't be old, so they won't be wise. Whatever cockeyed argument you can construct by scattering into a Deeply Wise template the words "old", "young", "wise", "decrepit", "healthy", "natural", "unnatural", "boredom", "inevitable", "denial", I heard worse.
If I can bear to listen again to the whole thing just to check I didn't miss anything important, I may write something on their discussion board.