Rite on.

"I've been abused and I've been confused and I've kissed Margaret Thatcher's shoes. And I been high and I been low and I don't know where to go. Birth, school, work, death" Birth, school, work, death - The Godfathers.

"All rituals are invented. They don't just come out of the ether from God" - Grayson Perry.

School and work weren't covered in Grayson Perry's recent Rites of Passage series on Channel 4 but birth and death were, together with marriage and coming of age. Grayson's not one to shy away from the big issues, either in his art or in his burgeoning career as a documentary maker, and so it proved in this wonderful, important, and utterly heartfelt four part series.

I like Grayson so much I can't even begrudge him travelling to places I'd love to visit (Indonesia, Japan, and Brazil in this series alone) to see what we, here in Britain, can learn about big life events and how they're handled. Each show follows a basic format. Grayson travels somewhere exotic to witness a funeral, a wedding, or the like, Grayson comes back to Britain and meets groups of people who are fast approaching similar events in their own life, he chats candidly to these people (and, via the camera, to us) and, finally, he makes a piece of art and devises his own unique ceremony for his willing guests to partake in.

Oh, and one other thing happens in each episode too. I weep a bucket load of tears. I'm a lachrymose old bastard as it is but this is some of the most emotional, yet life-affirming, television I have ever watched.

In episode one, DEATH, Grayson is off to Sulawesi to attend a five day funeral. The Toraja people aren't ones for rushing things. Funerals normally take place about a year after somebody dies, people need to process their grief before loved ones are buried. When the funeral takes place it's a big event. Buffalo are slaughtered. The more esteemed the departed the more buffalo meet their grisly end.

When Grayson returns to Hounslow he appears, initially, to have returned with a bit of that ugly self-hating Western thing where people who've travelled decide that other, often poorer, people somehow have a more spiritual dimension to their life than those they know and those they grew up with. I was on a boat in Guatemala once when a very privileged young lady on her gap year expounded to me her theory that the locals may be so poor they can barely afford food but they were, in many ways, much richer than us. Amazingly, I didn't push her out in to the lake.

Grayson's a bit smarter than that though, and certainly more empathetic. One of his great assets is that he listens as much as he talks, he identifies, he shows empathy rather than sympathy, he seeks to find connection, and he usually succeeds in this. His non-judgemental manner allows his guests to open up and speak freely about their own lives, experiences, hopes, and fears. It really is the mark of both 'the man' and 'a man'.

In Hounslow he meets Roch who's been living with, and about to die of, motor neurone disease for several years. Roch has had to think about death, his death specifically, in ways that are very real for a long time now and it's absolutely clear how he feels about it. Grayson's interview with Roch is unbelievably moving but Grayson also takes times to reflect on how perfunctory a funeral in the UK can be. He recounts attending one such event when the priest forgot the name of the person in the coffin.

Grayson also visits Middlesbrough to meet the bereaved parents of 17 year old Jordan, killed by a hit and run driver. Again, it's tearjerking yet, again, Grayson manages to make succinct points about how we process death in the West. He sees the Toraja as having rituals that need to be ticked off but I'd contend that we do too, secular though they may be.

Grayson Perry sits in suburban kitchens drinking tea, attends a Brentford match with Roch, and then returns to his studio, whacks on Joy Division's Atmosphere for an appropriately funereal atmosphere and sets about devising 'rituals' for both Roch and Jordan.

The parade around Jordan's home estate is touching enough but Roch's 'living funeral' may well be the most tearjerking thing I've ever seen on television. Even typing about it now I'm welling up which is not something you'd imagine of an event that features the glam rock stomp of The Sweet's Ballroom Blitz. Grayson's made a 'memory jar' into which Roch's friends and family insert mementos of their life with Roch, Roch's wife Deirdre reads a heartfelt tribute, and there's both a poem and a quote by Michel de Montaigne:- "if one knows how to live, one knows how to die".

Once I'd finished episode one I was both anxious to see where else Grayson could go with this while at the same time being concerned I may cry myself dry. At least with MARRIAGE I assumed my tears would be those of joy. That didn't quite prove to be the case.

This episode begins in Nagoya, Japan where Grayson's attending a Shinto wedding. A kimono is fitted, a bride cries, I cry (obvs), and the whole, very beautiful, scene seems to have been transplanted from some sort of idyllic long ago. But it's not, weddings only started taking place in Shinto temples in the 19c Meiji era thus proving Grayson's assertion that rituals are invented things and things that were invented for very clear reasons. Mile posts on life's often traumatic journey.

At a mock Tudor Hare Krishna temple in Watford (actually George Harrison's old house) Grayson gets to know Ben and Sarika from Newbury. Sarika's a Krishna but Ben's only religion appears to be cricket. It's certainly a life long passion and, like me with music, it's from where virtually all of his friendships hail.

Ben and Sarika are having two wedding ceremonies. The Hare Krishna one is sorted but the secular one, the day after, looks a little threadbare in the planning stage. Grayson employs some cricket motifs in the Staffordshire pottery figurines he uses to decorate the couple's wedding cake and it has to be said his input does add a bit of zest, some oomph, to what otherwise could have been a rather quotidian day.

While getting married is usually one of the happiest days in a person's life we all know, many of us painfully so, that nearly half of UK marriages end in divorce. That's a process that normally ends up in bitterness, rancour, paperwork, lawyers, and hurt. Often as hurt as the former couple are the children caught up in the divorce who have no say on it happening and no say in how it happens.

Grayson meets a formerly loving couple, Dilly and Mark, and their two teenage kids in Surrey. They've got a nice house, they're both attractive, their kids are lovely. It's hard to work out why they're getting divorced but such are the ever deepening mysteries of love. Grayson ekes out an interview with Mark, the instigator of the break up, which suggests midlife crises, fear of familiarity beginning to breed contempt, and raging against the dying of the light as being the ultimate motivating factors for this big decision.

After twenty five years marriage it's understandable and it's remarkable how Dilly and Mark laugh and joke with each other as they sign divorce papers on the kitchen table. Grayson devises for them a divorce ceremony in a local park in which they're joined by their friends (in the order they came into Dilly and Mark's life) in a procession before saying a few words, turning their backs on each other, and walking off into the uncertain future in different directions. See if you can guess if I cried or not!

Of course I bloody blubbed and the show on BIRTH was no different on that score either. This time the jammy gits makes me super jealous by hotfooting it out to Bali where, apparently, you're not considered a human until 105 days after you're born. Up to that point it's deemed the height of unluckiness should a baby ever touch the ground. People take turns holding the baby which puts a new spin on the old adage that it takes a village to raise a child.

The birth ceremony seems to involve as many of these carers (holders?) giving the baby one last little cuddle before he or she crosses over into our human world. There's quite a different, but equally loving, vibe in the Chelmsford neo-natal unit where the junior doctors are halfway through a ridiculously long, and criminally underpaid, twelve hour shift.

David and Lindsay's twins were delivered by an emergency Caesarean section three months prematurely and have spent their entire lives so far in the hospital. Needless to say David and Lindsay have spent most of their time there too. Eventually the babies return home hale and healthy and Grayson gives the NHS staff who cared so diligently for them little golden babies to say thanks for the all the little lives they've helped bring to Earth. All the lives they've saved basically. When these babies grow up and have their own children will they even have an NHS to look after them?

Certainly this Tory government is doing its best to make sure not and the Brexit vote has done much to make the foreign doctors and nurses that the NHS rely upon feel unwelcome here. If you wanted to ensure the continuation of the NHS the two best things you can do are campaign for a second referendum on Brexit and never vote Tory. Which you should never do anyway. What's wrong with you?

In Darlington, Laura is also pregnant with twins but, when they're born, Laura won't be mummy. Laura is a surrogate for Sara and Kobby who have wanted children for over a decade. Sara's already miscarried ten times. In his meetings with local surrogate support groups Grayson Perry managed to smash quite a few of my preconceptions.  I'd kind of imagined the surrogates to be anonymous people that the future parents never, or hardly ever, meet but it seems to me that in most cases they strike up friendships or at least good working relationships that continue once the child has been born.

If you had a plumbing job that needed doing and you had a friend who was a plumber you'd ask them. If you needed your car fixed you may ask a motor mechanic friend. So it makes perfect sense that if you want, and can look after, a baby and you know someone who's good at having babies you'd ask them.

The final show of the series, COMING OF AGE, sees Grayson off to Amazonian Brazil to witness an initiation ceremony for two girls. To celebrate the onset of menstruation the family have got in 15,000 litres of hooch, put on some rather odd facial make up, got some guys to shake some sticks, got some other guys to bang some drums - this is Brazil, and invited along a pantomime figure with a large fake cock that spunks out curry sauce, some of it over Grayson Perry's trousers.

While Grayson's cleaning the 'jizz' off his keks a man in some freaky get up pretends to fuck a bamboo wall with a prosthetic dick that looks like an engorged matchstick. It's a spectacle that's being enjoyed, or perhaps endured, by all the family. Your kids wouldn't want to miss this.

Eventually the girls, who've been behind the wall in a 'hut', are freed by matchstick cock man and, specifically, his matchstick cock in a piece of penis worship that looks like Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia remaking the video to Run DMC's Walk This Way on a day when he's suffering with particularly painful priapism.

Then the elder women of the village pull out the younger girls' hair with no little brutality. It looks painful. It looks unnecessary. I'd even go so far as to say it looks abusive. Much as I love Grayson Perry and his work I do have to dispute his theory that this ritual is somehow better than having a birthday cake and being taken to the pub by your dad. We don't do things like this because we've moved on - and I think that's a good thing. Try suggesting to a teenage London girl that she has her hair forcefully pulled out and you'll get a thoroughly deserved smack in the mouth.

So when Perry's back in London that's not what he suggests at all. He's in my 'hood, Lewisham, to meet teenage girls at the Young Women's Hub, a local charity that provides a safe and nurturing environment for vulnerable local girls. When he tells them about the Amazonian ritual they're absolutely certain that they'd not stand for that kind of behaviour. Unlike in the Amazon, these girls are from a multicultural environment and have more individuality than those growing up in more monocultural societies where more orthodox behavioural patterns are observed.

Perry, to his credit, takes this very well but he soon starts to notice that the education the girls get at the Young Women's Hub may be delivered very differently to those in the Amazon but the message itself is much the same. You don't need a guy with an engorged and unrealistic looking matchstick knob to warn young women about unhealthy relationships. Sometimes kind words do a better job.

The girls learn about the dangers of social media, peer pressure, and the expectations that boys who've watched too much pornography, "they watch it young, like" - states one savvy young lady, may have of them and how it's not their responsibility to fulfil anybody else's fantasies. To me aggressive male sexual posturing is more a threat to these young women than Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp.

It's heartbreaking to watch a fifteen year old girl cry when she thinks about her future. The lack of opportunities offered to her has left her with a lack of aspiration and all this at a time when both her body and her mind, teenage brains are soap Perry avers kindly, are changing.

Eventually, Grayson tries to give the girls the tools to give themselves confidence and it seems to work. They perform a ceremony, all singing, all dancing, and put it online for validation proving social media to be something of a two edged sword. You can be bulled on it, sure, but many of the younger generation rely on these platforms for validation, pix or it didn't happen. Some will criticize this but I don't think there's that much of a problem. It's just how life is. There are bigger things to get worked up about than people expressing themselves.

In Halifax we're introduced to a group of recovering adults. In many ways these people are 'kidults', a horrible, condescending word that nonetheless almost adequately explains their sense of having never really grown up, never really taken on responsibilities, and never really been honest even to themselves about their motivations and behaviour.

That's painting a disparate group of people who may have nothing in common except their addictions with way too broad a brush but accepting it as a general rule helps us understand why people who have masked their true feelings with alcohol and drugs for decades still have lots of 'growing up' to do and lots of difficult questions to ask of themselves. Not to mention lots of apologies to make.

There's lots of talk of shame ("shame is some tricky shit, ain't it? Makes you feel like you want to change and then beats you back down when you think you can't" - Walon, The Wire), there's lots of gum chewing, but there's also lots of courage on the part of people making, or trying to make, these difficult life changes before it's too late.

Fiona is a successful business woman but she's a successful business woman with a failing liver - and she's been very selfish in the past, alienating friends and family. But, with the help of the few family members who've stood by her, she's beginning to turn things round. A big event for her, for many of us, is the first time she gets up to dance sober. True adulthood, like dancing, is discovered in community and not alone. Or so I'm informed as I sit in front of the television with a moleskine notebook alone. I suddenly feel like a child.

After sober dancing the next big challenge is to have sex sober but the show is coming to an end so we're spared those images. Grayson presents the recovering addicts with a badge/amulet in a non-denominational church and some of them get up to speak frankly and emotionally about their experiences, about their 'journey' if you will. Written down it may sound mawkish but on the screen, ably guided by Perry's curatorial hand, it touches your heart. Once again, for one last time, tears stream down my cheeks like arcs of piss on a paving stone outside a town centre pub on Friday night.

This was a sweet show, a polished piece of work, and a necessary reminder that despite all the focus on the bad people and liars, all the column inches eaten up by Donald Trump, Boris fucking Johnson, and the deservedly bankrupt (now actual as well as moral) Katie Hopkins, that most people are nice, most people are kind, most people are trying their best, and most people are more likely to help you than they are hurt you.

One of the very nicest, very kindest, and most helpful people in the public eye at the moment just happens to be Grayson Perry. I can't help thinking he's a positive force who, with programmes like this, will change people's lives for the better. Who'd have thought that from a show that featured a man with a prosthetic penis attempting to copulate with a bamboo partition.