The Missing

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As an Executive Producer, I took a great interest in the production. Finding the right actors to play these boys was a crucial task from the beginning. We looked at a lot of very talented people but the ones we found seemed to burst with energy and understanding. Casting is a tough game and it keeps you up at night!

Another man, only 50, appeared to have given up since his Billy disappeared. He looked out the window of his flat, he told me, and wondered about all the missing people out there: "What is home to them?" I did get to meet Tom, it was lovely having him playing the younger Tully. We obviously didn’t have much interaction but when we did it was a real pleasure and great to watch him work. In his acclaimed first book, The Missing (1995), O'Hagan wrote about his own childhood and told the stories of parents whose children had disappeared. The book was shortlisted for the Esquire Award, the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award, and the McVities Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year award. Part of the book was adapted for radio and television as Calling Bible John and won a BAFTA award. A theatre adaptation was staged by the National Theatre of Scotland in 2011. Our Fathers (1999), his first novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. The book tells the story of young Scot Jamie Bawn and a visit to his dying grandfather that leads him to uncover the truth about his family's past. His vision of modern Britain has the quality of a poetic myth, with himself as Bunyan's questing Christian and the missing as Dantesque souls in limbo.' Blake Morrison, Guardian It is exactly that,” O’Hagan says, “and I have never taken it for granted. The most dramatic ways out of childhoods like mine were boxing, a pools win, or making it in a band. My grandfather was a boxer, who died at 34. For our generation the most reliable was music. We could watch all those brilliant scallies like, say, Echo and the Bunnymen, become genuine heroes, creative, political, articulate. They showed us that it could be done.”

In Personality (2003), O’Hagan takes as his theme the cult of celebrity, which he shows to be a modern malaise grounded in insincerity and manipulation. The protagonist, Maria Tambini, is loosely based on the Scottish child singing sensation Lena Zavaroni, and the story includes cameos by several real-life entertainers and television stars of the 1970s. But Maria’s story goes beyond facts, into a moving fictional portrait of the many Italians who settled in Scotland earlier in the century. The novel’s description of how members of the Tambini family were interned during the war; how their café windows were smashed and their businesses ostracised, provides the hidden immigrant history to the precarious position they eventually come to occupy, in a small fish and chip shop on the Scottish Isle of Bute. Maria’s journey from here to London, with its voracious celebrity culture, is a further stage therefore in the geographical displacements and political transitions of an extended and fragmented family history. The reach of his sense of home extends beyond this room. He finds time to run a cafe at the end of the street, with Sam Frears, the charismatic son of Stephen and Mary-Kay Wilmers who was born with severely disabling Riley-Day syndrome – and to be a global Unicef ambassador. “For me,” O’Hagan says at one point, “the idea of society isn’t some Henry Jamesian world of dinner parties, it is being so good at being civilised that we want to let different people waft in, whatever their beginning in life.” O’Hagan, Andrew (7 June 2018). "The Tower". London Review of Books. 40 (11) . Retrieved 26 September 2021. Keith Martin, aged 17, performing at a youth club in Irvine new town in his We Are All Prostitutes T-shirt, 1983. Photograph: courtesy of Andrew O’Hagan There is an interesting marker of the persistence of this question in the verbatim repetition in Personality of a phrase from Our Fathers. In the latter book, when the drunken father gives up the booze and reclaims a sort of life, he finds comfort in a series of slogans he paints on pieces of wood, which he then stains and sandpapers and hangs up in his caravan. One of these is Alcoholics Anonymous’s ‘One Day at a Time’. Here’s how the words appear in Personality. Maria has become a star, although still prey to anorexia, collapse and bouts of not working, and with a singing style that was out of date before she started – part of her charm but also part of her peril. She appears on the Terry Wogan show, and takes part in the following dialogue:

There is certainly nothing self-congratulatory about O’Hagan’s fourth novel, Be Near Me (2006). Like Our Fathers and The Missing, it describes in devastating detail the effects of the collapse of heavy industry, but attention switches from Glasgow to a small town in Ayrshire, following the loss of coal mining, a chemical plant, a steelworks and an armaments factory: ‘Men worked in those places for forty years and at the end of it the Jobcentre was trying to turn them into Avon ladies.’ I was on the set a lot, mainly as a cheerleader and a mascot. I wanted to be available to the screenwriter, Andrea, to the director, Peter, and to the actors, who would often ask me about a particular detail or a local Scottish habit from the past. Authenticity was important to us all and I tried to pitch in and assist where I could. It was also just fun to be with these brilliant people as they worked to tell this very warm-hearted story. O'Hagan was born in Glasgow city centre in 1968, [1] [2] of Irish Catholic descent, and grew up in Kilwinning, North Ayrshire. [3] His mother was a school cleaner, his father worked as a joiner in Paisley, and he had four elder brothers. [1] His father was a violent alcoholic, and as a boy, he would hide books from his father under his bed. [4]

I love being an Executive Producer and everything that comes with it. I used to be an actor so I enjoy being on set and watching the actors creating magic from the words. With Mayflies, I’ve been very involved in every stage of the process - from casting, through the shoot, and into the edit. Working closely with Claire and producer Brian Kaczynski, and seeing first-hand how production schedules and budgets impact on script, has been invaluable. I hope I can use that knowledge and understanding going into my next scripts. In 2006, his third novel, Be Near Me, was published by Faber and Faber and long-listed for that year's Booker Prize. It went on to win the Los Angeles Times's 2007 Prize for Fiction. [7] In 2008, he edited a new selection of Robert Burns's poems for Canongate Books, published as A Night Out with Robert Burns. A copy was lodged in every secondary school in Scotland. Following on from this, he wrote and presented a three-part film on Burns for the BBC, The World According to Robert Burns, first on 5 January 2009. In January 2011, Scotland on Sunday gave away 80,000 copies of the book. Also in 2008, Faber & Faber published O'Hagan's first non-fiction collection, The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Saltire Book of the Year Award. [8] Los Angeles Times - Festival of Books". Festival of Books. Archived from the original on 16 January 2016 . Retrieved 29 June 2016. Before she closed her eyes she looked over at the window. The glass was clear, but just before the darkness of sleep, for the briefest second, she was sure she saw the face of a small girl. The girl looked in, tapped at the glass, and disappeared. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bestoffestivals/andrew-o'hagan-in-conversation/8054660

In Mayflies, Tully and Jimmy’s first move toward getting out is to that music weekend in Manchester. The friends see The Smiths walking through a pub, where Morrissey “hit[s] the air like a chip pan fire” – a very 1980s simile, I point out. “I’m claiming it, the chip pan fire!” O’Hagan says. “The great chip pan fire novelist of the age!” There was a courtroom in Dursley, Gloucestershire, where they played us the tapes of Rosemary West being interviewed. As they were playing, the novelist Gordon Burn tilted up his notepad towards me. It simply said: "The Uncanny." Gordon was by then a veteran of life-estranging murder stories, but he later said he had nightmares about the West case, as did the case's best reporter, the Guardian's Duncan Campbell, who led me by the hand.In a brilliant merging of reportage, social history and memoir, Andrew O'Hagan clears a devastating path from the bygone Glasgow of the 1970s to the grim secrets of Gloucester in the mid 1990s. Anna is Tully’s wife. She is a lawyer and a strong woman who has met the love of her life in Tully. He is all she needs. They are a great partnership, their relationship is solid and passionate. Tully has met his match in Anna.

The fact is that both approaches are possible, as Orwell understood. Fifteen thousand words of The Missing appeared in the Guardian, while, not long after publication, the then literary director of the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh spoke about a stage version. I went to see him a dozen years ago, but I just didn't feel ready to write it: I suppose I was still a little haunted by the correspondences the book had revealed to me, and was keen to man the sails in a voyage out from there. The notion of missing persons helps us here, although in O’Hagan’s work it is, appropriately, rather elusive at first. There are ‘all sorts’ of missing persons, he tells us, and he gives us a haunting account of many vanishings, especially of children. ‘The space they occupy lies somewhere between what we know about the ways of being alive and what we hear about the ways of being dead . . . The person missing cannot be brought into focus.’ But then it turns out that for O’Hagan the worst, in many cases, is not to be missing. The worst is to be found, the grisly end of the mystery, ‘the dark, worst, last thing’. He doesn’t simply mean that death, the finally identified corpse, is the end of everyone’s hope. He means that death repeals the whole implied adventure of being missing, and a certain tantalising ambiguity enters the picture. This is where he says: ‘I’ve been looking for missing persons, in my own head, for as long as I can remember.’ In context, the sentence confesses a fear that many children have, and take with them into adult life: that they could be among the missing, or perhaps already are. Taken more broadly, though, it’s not a bad description of what novelists do. They look in their own heads for a special class of missing persons: people who can’t be found because they don’t exist and so can’t die. In The Missing, the emphasis is on the sudden and distressing absence of real people, the failure of focus. O’Hagan’s novels concentrate on the temptation of flight, of going missing from your old life, and the virtue of fiction in such an inquiry is that it allows us to shadow the missing persons, even eavesdrop on their minds, without quite finding them. The novels, unlike the first book, insist on the incompleteness of most disappearances, and this is where we meet the all too faithful children and the all too persistent parents. Yes, I listened to the audio book before moving ahead and remember thinking how lived in it felt. When I met Andrew, the writer, he told me that he had voiced the novel for audio book. I love it when authors do that. You really get to hear their thoughts, with every utterance. This was made even more powerful when I learnt that it was inspired by a true story, on his own experiences. Knott, Matthew (31 May 2023). "FBI restarts Julian Assange probe despite hopes of release". The Age . Retrieved 2 June 2023.The BBC announces new Scottish drama Mayflies, starring Martin Compston, Tony Curran and Ashley Jensen". BBC.co.uk. There are different ways to be a misper (as police jargon for missing persons has it.) Some people have reasons for going missing - and want to remain so. Many folk O’Hagan met in an occasional shelter, for drop-ins, fell into that category. He also notes an increasing category of missing who are simply unnoticed until their bodies are found in their homes months or years after their deaths. Tully is 50 years old and he’s an English teacher who lives in a small town in Scotland with his wife Anna. Mayflies will air on BBC Scotland, BBC One and BBC iPlayer. All3Media International are handling international sales.