To die by your side
Andrew O’Hagan’s novel has inspired a touching drama about life-long mates facing up to mortality.
MAYFLIES, TVNZ+, from Friday April 7
Tully is the kind of man who, having resolved to end it all and save all the bother by walking into the sea, does so wearing his Jesus and Mary Chain Psychocandy T-shirt. Mayflies is a story about the men of a certain age who not only still like to get out a Fall album every now and then, but who also feel in some way defined by the music of their youth. If you’re not one yourself, you probably know one or two.
Andrew O’Hagan, the 54-year-old on whose 2020 novel the two-part drama is based, mused in an interview with the Guardian about the book that post-punk music was the stuff of lifelong camaraderie for men of his generation.
“Our fathers may have found their friendships in the army or in a factory. Our children may find them online. In between was that moment when you made half your friends at bus stops with people who had the same mission as you: heading into town to buy the new Smiths record.”
Andrea Gibb, who adapted the novel for TV, described O’Hagan’s novel as “unusual because it explores platonic love between a group of young working-class men who are steeped in politics and culture and who dare to dream of a life beyond their own circumstances. It’s inspirational in that way.”
She hoped, she said, that viewers “laugh and fall in love with the characters. I hope they empathise with the situation and I hope it demonstrates that life is precious and short, and we should treasure it.”
The screen version does make a major structural change. In O’Hagan’s original, the lads live their youthful lives of bands, record shops and adventures in the first half of the novel and grapple with all-too-mortal middle age in the second.
The BBC production tells the friends’ history as flashbacks linked to the challenges of the moment the grown-up friends find themselves in. It’s largely successful, although the key musical flashback – a concert based on Manchester’s 1986 Festival of the 10th Summer, where New Order, The Fall and Smiths played – seems less exciting than it should be.
But one key element flows across both versions: O’Hagan’s story, as he has emphasised in interviews, is closely autobiographical. Jimmy, played by Martin Compston ( Line of Duty), is the young O’Hagan, a regionaltown literary kid who was game for a laugh but could quote Edith Sitwell. Tully is Keith Martin, O’Hagan’s real-life friend who really did advance from the factory floor to a career as a beloved English teacher – and whose death from cancer at the age of 51 inspired the novel.
Like Tully, Martin really did sing in a band (they even got a spin from John Peel) and he was hailed by another friend, Glasgow journalist John Niven, as “fiercely autodidactic, constantly creative and political,” with a life that “embodied many of the best, progressive working-class traditions of the west coast of Scotland”. Tony Curran’s boisterous, rawboned
performance as Tully brings that characterisation convincingly to life.
Martin was also a strong believer in the right to die with dignity and Mayflies becomes an exploration of the meaning of assisted dying. Who owns life? Is there a responsibility to stick around as long as possible? Do we expect our loved ones to simply pick up the pieces?
It’s a situation where there are few clear rights and wrongs and certainly no villains. Everyone, the way real people do, is simply trying to do their best.
In its resolution of these swirling questions, the story of Mayflies does depart somewhat from what really happened for O’Hagan and his friend, but the right-to-die question was central enough for the author to become the founding patron of a Scottish advocacy group in 2021.
“There are many sides to this debate – all of them valid,” Gibb told the BBC. “I hope Mayflies will help kickstart a conversation. It’s an important one, and one we should be having as a society. But this is not just a story about assisted dying, it’s a story about living. It’s about humanity, in all its flawed glory, and the importance of the connections we make.”
In his tribute to the real Keith Martin, Niven settled on a key detail of his final bedside visit: “He was wearing an old Clash T-shirt as he told me it was time for him to go.” Would that we all depart in a favourite T-shirt. ▮
O’Hagan’s friend advanced from the factory floor to a career as a beloved teacher.