1000 Tiny Birds

Mayflies S1

I am not a newspaper columnist, so far be it from me to find two examples of something and decide it’s a trend. That said. I’m bemused and intrigued by the recent rise of dramas that focus on the “male best friend” relationship, the Oscar favourite The Banshees of Inisherin being the popular example du jour. Enter, then, Mayflies, a two-part BBC drama adapted by Andrea Gibb from a novel I haven’t read and so will not comment any further on. Tully and Jimmy, best mates since school, enter a new phase of their relationship as Tully is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Gibb smartly manages to wring two “issue” strands out of this - the aforementioned friendship element, and the question of the autonomy and selfishness of assisted suicide - and ably weaves them together. But beyond the plane tickets to Switzerland, it poses the more generalisable question: what is it fair to ask of others? Is it fair to expect so much more of the people close to you? Do you owe anything to your best friend’s loved ones, outside the vacuum of your own relationship? Knotty stuff. Emotional, too. A gentle sob, but something about the subject matter does that for me anyway.