Mayflies, review: a devastating, daring ode to life, death and friendship

Not much serious contemporary fiction gets adapted for TV these days. The business model favours open-ended multi-season drama, so the crafted finality of a shortish and well-made novel doesn’t quite fit (or pay) the bill. That Andrew O’Hagan’s autobiographical Mayflies (BBC One), published only two years ago, has slipped through the net is cause for downbeat rejoicing – downbeat only because the richly textured story ended up in Switzerland, where denouements are never less than final.

The locale was mainly a housing estate on the coast of Ayrshire, where Jimmy (Martin Compston) was summoned from exile in London to receive news that his closest friend, Tully (Tony Curran), had just months to live. Anointing Jimmy as his helpmeet, Tully wanted to end it all on his own terms in a euthanasia clinic. This reckoned without the wishes of Tully’s partner, Anna (Ashley Jensen), in whom he refused to confide for fear she’d make him to cling on for longer.

Meanwhile, lively flashbacks to the mid 1980s portrayed the birth of young male friendship. A gang led by Tully awakened to politics and culture, making a rambunctious pilgrimage to Manchester to wig out and sprawl all over Johnny Marr’s motor.

While it made for good nostalgic fun, the most resonant element of this half of the story concerned the escape of young Jimmy (Rian Gordon) to university and onwards to writerly success. Movingly, he was shooed into this other life by an enlightened teacher who urged him to get out and never come back. Such stories were in the ether at the time. I was put in mind of Cinema Paradiso: a nearly identical speech was made to young Totò by Philippe Noiret’s old Sicilian projectionist.

The two sections of the story, consecutive in the novel, here folded neatly across each other. But the real meat was in the present day. Compston, as the stolid loyal introvert, quietly ceded the floor to Curran, who raged and hollered and charmed like Billy Connolly’s ginger kid brother. It was a mighty powerhouse of a performance encapsulating a tragic paradox: the vital mind thwarted in its prime by the dying body. As for Jensen, she too was heartrending as the living embodiment of Tully’s prediction: “I won’t miss Anna because I won’t exist. It’s you poor f---ers who’ll do all the missing.”

The script was by Andrea Gibb, whose empathy for end-of-life stories was last seen in her script for Elizabeth Is Missing starring Glenda Jackson as a woman afflicted with dementia. OK, so Mayflies wasn’t remotely seasonal. Bound for Zurich, Tully and co sat under a sign for Terminal 1 while the airport tannoy made “the final call”. Ha ha. And we wish you a merry Christmas too.

But this story of departures – from home, from life – couldn’t cast too gloomy a pall. It was also a warm, sentimental hymn to friendship with all its rites and reference points (De Niro, Dalglish, Aztec Camera). In the words of O’Hagan such a bond, forged in youth, tested in middle age and memorialised here, is “another kind of romance”.

The author disobeyed that teacherly injunction to keep his distance, making a Hitchcockian cameo as a random person who walked Anna down the aisle for her wedding. He also gave his novel away to television and, although one or two less central characters felt diminished in the transition, it made for an intensely happy marriage.

Both episodes of Mayflies are on BBC iPlayer now; episode one is on BBC One on Wednesday 28 December