Greek tragedy was the very first formal theatrical genre to be invented. Created in the 5th century BC to honour the Greek god Dionysos during his annual festival in Athens, it developed over the next century or so thanks to numerous playwrights, including Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, to give us some of the greatest ever works of Western theatre and literature.
But since those times, as a genre, it’s pretty much fallen by the wayside. For all that David Simon and his fellow writers on The Wire may claim to have written to the rules of Greek tragedy rather than the more common Shakespearean model, they rarely touched on the classic formula devised by Aristotle for tragedy: the hubris, catharsis then nemesis of the protagonist, an ordinary man, who through some tragic flaw or mistake is eventually undone by the gods.
Greek tragedy itself didn’t always stick to the formula (e.g. Euripides’ Helene, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound), so you have to hand it to former Daily Mirror journalist turned TV writer Michael J Bird to not only create one of the very few modern pieces of drama to stick to that formula, but to also set it and film it in Greece with a largely Greek cast.
1977’s BBC2 serial Who Pays The Ferryman? sees former soldier turned boat builder Alan Haldane (Jack Hedley from Colditz) return to Crete after more than 30 years’ absence. A legendary fighter with the Crete resistance during the War, he’d been a hero to the people and had fallen in love with Melina, one of the women he’d met there. Hoping to meet with her again after all this time, he tragically discovers that she has died. Compounding his misery, he is now getting a cold shoulder from the people who’d formerly seen him as a hero and been his friends.
Why? Well, unbeknownst to him, she’d fallen pregnant with his child. She wrote to him and, given the Cretan attitudes of the time and receiving no reply, she ended up marrying another man who would raise the daughter as his own. Haldane, who never received the letters and who now discovers his own letters to her were never received, decides to meet the now grown-up daughter he never knew he had and become her benefactor. And along the way, he meets a woman Annika (played by the very famous Greek actress Betty Arvaniti), who seems very familiar …
Why no one received the letters from their respective lovers and the lengths some people will go to to destroy Haldane are some of the central dilemmas of a very Greek story about vendetta, family and even the gods themselves that does not, of course, have a very happy ending. Here’s the title sequence, followed by the opening of the second episode. It features the incredibly popular and catchy theme song by Cretan composer Yannis Markopoulos.
Oh, and here’s Marina Sirtis – Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation – in her second ever TV appearance. This is all she gets to do, mind.
My lovely and esteemed wife has recently introduced me to the joys of Cabin Pressure, a Radio 4 comedy series set aboard the fictitious MJN (My Jet Now) Air, a tiny little outfit run by the crabby Carolyn Knapp-Shappey (Stephanie Cole from Waiting for God) that has only two pilots – the by-the-book captain Martin Crieff (Benedict Cumberbatch from Sherlock, Star Trek et al) and the ever-superior first officer Douglas Richardson (Roger Allam from The Thick Of It and Endeavour) – and an air steward, Cole’s simple but eternally upbeat son Arthur (John Finnemore, who also writes the show).
Featuring guest stars including John Sessions, Anthony Head (playing the fabulously named Hercules Shipwright), Prunella Scales and Alison Steadman, it’s an award-winning comedy with surprising depths that largely revolves around the games the pilots play to stave off boredom on long flights, the schemes they need to concoct to deal with difficult customers, mechanics and other airlines, and the tensions between Crieff and Richardson, Crieff always wanting to have been a pilot but having no real aptitude, while Richardson has never found anything hard but after a distinguished career, now finds himself first officer to Crieff at MJN thanks to his crossing certain legal lines at his previous job.
As well as being very funny, well written and well acted, it’s also capable of pathos and drama, so I recommend you catch up as best you can via Amazon, iTunes or other avenues.
The show is also a creator of some great memes. Here, for example, is the birth of the ‘Hey, Chief…’ meme, which my wife and I find a constant source of hilarity when we use it on each other (yes, we’re a fun pair):
If you’re a Cabin Pressure fan already, though, please enjoy the following encapsulation of a whole bunch of Cabin Pressure memes in a manner similar to the current Nikon ads. Do you recognise them all?
