by Alev Scott
As domestic and international media began to show footage of Turkish protesters being attacked by police in 2013, the government responded by describing the protesters as dangerous looters manipulated by an ‘interest rate lobby’ whose mission it was to bring down the Turkish economy. Turkish soaps began broadcasting propaganda-style episodes in which brave policemen resisted unprovoked attacks from protesters and responded only unwillingly with tear gas. In one memorable episode, the interest rate lobby group are unconvincing villains represented by a couple of snappily dressed businessmen who cackle as they watch protesters and police fighting from behind a fence, high-fiving each other as the clashes get out of control. Incidentally, the channel that aired this was Samanyolu, a nationalist channel with links to the Islamic movement headed by the cleric Fethullah Gülen. While these soaps were obviously aimed at a Turkish audience, I’m sure they were seen by a fair number of Arab viewers too.
The popularity of Turkish soap operas in Arab countries has caused problems over the years. Prominent Saudi clerics, including the Grand Mufti himself, complain during the holy month of Ramadan about too many people watching programmes glorifying loose morals in the evenings after their iftar (fast-breaking) dinner. In November 2012, Macedonia’s Information and Society Minister announced that the broadcasting of Turkish soaps would be reduced on national channels, as Macedonia’s own programmes were being pushed past midnight while Turks hogged the precious primetime slots. ‘To remain under Turkish rule for five hundred years is quite enough,’ apparently.
This has done very little to dent the mass viewership of these soaps. One particular series, Gümüş (Silver), a sentimental rags-to-riches cliché that ran to one hundred episodes over two years, was renamed Noor (Light) for its Arab audience and became far more popular abroad than in Turkey, reaching 85 million viewers in Arab countries alone for its final episode in August 2008. Part of its success was explained by the fact that the programme was dubbed into the widely spoken Syrian dialect of Arabic, rather than classical Arabic, which had previously been used for imported soaps such as Mexican telenovelas. Noor was the real breakthrough in the phenomenon of Turkish soap operas’ popularity abroad, and set the standard high: the lead actors, Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ and Songül Öden, were catapulted to cross-continental fame, their characters inspiring a generation of baby names, their onscreen wardrobes copied and sold in the most far-flung souks. A feature-length film starring the original cast is in production as I write.
It would seem that the semi-liberal yet not-too-alien lifestyles idealised in Turkish diziler are perfectly pitched for an Arab audience yearning for a world to which they can both relate and aspire, an audience which cannot necessarily identify with Western TV. Turkey is, after all, recognisably Middle Eastern while having many of the attractive trappings and fashions of a European country. There is more freedom for women, crucially, and most of the storylines involve some kind of romantic intrigue designed to be pleasantly shocking for the average housewife.
Aşk-ı Memnu is a wildly popular modernised tale of secret lust adapted from an Ottoman-set novel of the same name, and seems to me the quintessential dizi. It centres on the claustrophobic situation of a young wife conducting an affair with the handsome nephew of her old, rich husband under the noses of everyone in the house. Worse, the heroine’s scheming mother has designs on the old husband, and towards the end the dashing nephew gets engaged to the heroine’s stepdaughter. The heroine duly kills herself. Stolen embraces, laden silences and guilty glances fill every episode. When the credits start to roll, one realises that hardly anything has actually happened in ninety minutes, but the tension has been pulled ridiculously, unsustainably high. It is like an elongated, meaningless cliffhanger with all the qualities of a tooth being drawn. But it is somehow very watchable, and Middle Eastern housewives cannot get enough of it. The atmosphere of stifled lust and the pressure of social restrictions prevalent in so many communities in the Arab world are dramatically reproduced on screen with improbably daring characters playing out the housewife’s wildest dreams. More often than not, the onscreen femme fatale is fatally punished, but the aproned spectator has lived through her for scores of episodes.
This breed of TV is brilliantly simple but sensational escapism, typically gilded by a luxurious setting (or the promise of luxury), social competition and cathartic falls from grace. Many of the soaps are set in wealthy houses on the banks of the Bosphorus; the female characters wear designer dresses and full make-up to breakfast, the children have governesses, and there is usually an Upstairs, Downstairs scenario going on, with the kitchen staff or local salesmen providing comic relief in the interludes between the glitterati’s wrangling. To a Western eye, it all seems totally over the top, grotesque even. And yet a lifestyle which is patently several million dollars beyond what most Turks could afford is not seen as improbable and alienating but rather, impossibly exciting, the stuff of dreams. Producers such as Ay Yapım, the production company behind Aşk-ı Memnu and other successful shows, have developed a magic formula and are pursuing it doggedly.
I began watching the soaps to improve my Turkish. I had initially started off watching cult films like G.O.R.A (a sci-fi spoof by much lauded Turkish comedian Cem Yılmaz), but the lightning pace of the dialogue defeated me. Instead, soppy classics such as Aşk-ı Memnu, Muhteşem Yüzyıl and Kuzey Güney (North, South) became my linguistic bibles. I can highly recommend these soaps to anyone wishing to improve their Turkish, because they are invariably filled with pregnant pauses (allowing the looking-up of new vocabulary) and the kind of acting which renders dialogue largely superfluous – sadly not in an Alec Guinness kind of way, but more like a nuanced mime artist. The plot is reinforced yet further by the heart-rending strings and sinister percussion of traditional Turkish music, expelling any remaining confusion over what is going on. This is of course a slight exaggeration, and I have often worried about the intricacies of which character knows what details about the secret betrayal/affair/switch of allegiance currently unfolding; luckily these mysteries have, if anything, added zest to the exercise. I remind myself of my grandmother, who spoke not a word of English, but would never miss an episode of Dallas, providing her own specialised interpretation of the plot and chiding the characters in animated Turkish as she watched.
For the dizi dilettante there is an extensive underworld of niche, budget soaps which are almost more fascinating than the mainstream ones, if less watchable. Many of them follow similar lines of ill-fated romances, but often draw their inspiration from real life. One particularly unfortunate series was inspired by the true story of Sarah and Musa, the stars of a scandal which the Daily Mail and Mirror covered with ghoulish tenacity, as did most of the Turkish media, in the summer of 1996. Unlikely thirteen-year-old heroine Sarah Cook accompanied her parents on holiday to Kahramanmaraş in southern Turkey, and ran away with an eighteen-year-old waiter called Musa Kömeağaç. As the world watched, aghast, the two got married. British papers decried the disgraceful neglect of everyone responsible while Turkish papers, although officially shocked, rather enjoyed the romance of it all. Sarah fell pregnant and was finally whisked back to England.
Sara ile Musa (Sarah and Musa, Together) was the series that drew its inspiration from this cause célèbre. It was not a roaring success, lasting only five episodes, but it is astonishing that someone thought it was a good idea to serialise the story at all – it would be like making a soap opera out of the British schoolgirl Megan Stammers running off with her maths teacher in September 2012. Turkish papers occasionally revisit the Sarah-and-Musa story, some sixteen years on, printing sadly nostalgic pieces about Musa missing his distant son, but declaring himself happy with his new Turkish wife. This, to my mind, is absolutely typical of the Turkish trait of dramatising and romanticising everything, no matter how inappropriate in the eyes of the rest of the world.
For sheer genre variety, I am very glad that such series exist but it cannot be said that they have the same mass appe
al as the glamorous blockbusters like Aşk-ı Memnu. The actors involved in these are huge heart-throbs, in a way that is almost old-fashioned now in the West due to the proliferation of transient talent-show stars and the myriad avenues of celebrity. Turkey has its fair share of minor celebrities, but there are a handful of astronomically well-paid actors who take on most of the lead parts in the top soaps and who are real megastars as a result. One actor in particular, Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ (the male lead in Gümüş, Aşk-ı Memnu and Kuzey Güney), has cult-like status across the Arab world, where he far outranks Hollywood types like Brad Pitt. Tatlıtuğ was once sighted in the mall in which I worked, and I went to the office bathroom at lunchtime to discover it packed with near-hysterical ladies daubing themselves with war-paint rouge, ready to go and hunt down the poor man like sexually charged Bacchic priestesses. Although most soap viewers and fans are female, Middle Eastern men are equally dedicated star worshippers. The equivalent of Tatlıtuğ is Beren Saat, the actress who plays his adulteress lover in Aşk-ı Memnu. There are forums devoted to Saat in which Arab men post odes to her eyes and chastity. It would seem that there is a degree of separation in the minds of fans between onscreen characters and the actors themselves, which is charming.
The stardom and money involved in TV has completely changed the world of acting in Turkey, and has been the death knell of theatre. The Golden Age of Turkish theatre peaked in the seventies and eighties, before the dramatic emergence of popular culture in the nineties and the mushrooming of singers and well-paid celebrities of every kind. Theatre was politicised and relevant in a pre-TV era where people went there to hear a story. Touring Anatolian troupes earned money, like British theatre in rep, and new plays were a talking point. An industry existed.
That is, for the most part, lost now. There is a relatively poor tradition of philanthropy in the arts in Turkey, which is partly the product of decades of turbulent politics and economic uncertainty, but it is also just not a big part of the culture. The result of this is that, when not prioritised by the state – as is the case now – theatres are crippled. In Britain, despite much vilified Arts Council cuts, theatre is still going relatively strong. One has the sense that it is still important, that it can affect people’s conversations and concerns and be part of the popular voice. Many young people in Turkey don’t even know what theatre is any more. It is a word vaguely connected with actors, so people think it is a genre of television series or film. Many of those that do know of it think it is a slightly effete waste of time.
If theatre had been replaced by good TV, this would not be such a catastrophic loss. As it is, diziler dominate primetime TV and a dizi is emphatically not a TV series, but a soap opera. They are completely based on ratings, episode by episode, and if they get a negative response from the public, the plot is rewritten or the show is simply pulled. There is no equivalent of BBC drama on the national channels in terms of artistic integrity or vision. The name of the game is profit, and each production company is a moneymaking powerhouse riding the crest of a six-year boom.
Serdar Bilis is a Turkish theatre director based in London, but he occasionally works in Turkish theatre despite the constant frustrations involved. He also teaches drama at private universities Kadir Has and Yeditepe, both in Istanbul, which is pretty much the only avenue for theatre directors to earn money these days. According to him, Turkish actors feel obliged to pretend they want to be involved in stage productions, but only because they are guiltily aware that theatre used to be a noble art. Serdar has been frequently subjected to the frustration of beginning rehearsals for a play only to have his actors answer calls from their agents mid-rehearsal, claiming to be available and agreeing to offers of parts in the newest TV series. Their priorities are clear, and the figures make sense: TV actors earn the equivalent of £7,000 a week, on average. Huge stars get about £12,000 a week while lower, plot-filling actors get about £2,000. That is big money in a country where the minimum wage is less than £100 per week. Not only is there no money involved in theatre, the glamour and popular support it used to enjoy have now vanished. As a result, there is very low morale among the few stage actors who still try to make a career of it.
Young actors are rarely stage-trained these days, heading straight for TV or film, but it is interesting to note that most of the successful diziler have a couple of ageing stage legends to lend gravitas to a cast otherwise comprised of nubile youths with patchy talent. These are generally male, and no younger than fifty-five. In the UK, it would be like watching Derek Jacobi or Ian McKellen on screen with the cast of Hollyoaks, uttering crass lines with sonorous subtlety.
A striking example of a stage legend who never featured on glitzy TV soaps is the late theatre actor Erol Günaydın, whom I met a few weeks before his death in August 2012. The once lauded thespian star spent the last years of his life in relative poverty, ill health and obscurity in his daughter Ayşe’s house in Bodrum, with frequent stints in nearby hospitals. I remember watching Kuzey Güney with him in a stuffy room one night during a heatwave, and asking him what he thought of the acting. His answer was unprintable. A successful celebrity of the seventies, his only income at the end of his life consisted in paltry royalties from a couple of TV commercials, although he had played the lead in Çiçek Taksi, a low-budget, low-profile soap about taxi drivers. One day, out of the blue, his AKP-despising daughter Ayşe received a call from Prime Minister Erdoğan in her Italian restaurant in Bodrum. Mr Erdoğan had heard of Günaydın’s plight and wished to offer his personal help to such a distinguished icon of the stage. Günaydın was immediately airlifted from his hospital in Bodrum (where he was more feared than adored by the staff due to his furious temper and foul language) to a hospital offering the best care possible in Istanbul. When he died, a few days later, Ayşe received condolences from AKP members and a call offering to send refreshments to the wake. Ayşe’s requests for beer were quietly ignored – crates of soft drinks were sent to the house. These were left untouched in a corner as mourners drank in happy memory of the great man.
Erdoğan’s concern for Erol Günaydın is confusingly at odds with his attitude to modern theatre practitioners, whom he has vilified in the national press as alcoholic lowlifes, but this instance of respectable old-world celebrity is an interesting precursor to the current, stratospheric stardom of commercial TV actors. According to Serdar, Turkish actors are unique even among the international acting community for wanting to be the Star – of everything. As he put it, wryly, ‘In a production of Hamlet, there would have to be six Hamlets. The most common question I get asked is: “Have you got a one-man show?”’ The obvious outcome of this attitude is that there is no sense of ensemble in a cast. This egocentricity is no doubt an inevitable result of the rise of TV – when there is the opportunity for one’s face to be known by millions of people, it is understandable to crave that kind of recognition and respect. Theatre, by comparison, offers very little in that department. In all probability, a combination of factors within the industry and society in general has resulted in this fame-hungry approach, but it also fits with the stereotypical personality of a Turkish actor, according to those who know them best.
I was once waiting in the passport control queue at Atatürk airport when I spotted a familiar face in the snaking line behind me: Martin Turner, a British actor with whom I had worked a couple of years previously in London. He was bearded and tanned and I was astonished to learn that he had been in Turkey for the last six months shooting a series called Son (End). Martin looks a lot like Jeremy Irons and has distinguished himself as a stage actor under directors like Rupert Goold and Max Stafford-Clark – what on earth was he doing in a Turkish soap opera that would do nothing for his career? The answer was money. The hard truth is that an ex-RSC actor with decades of acting experience can earn far more as a peripheral character on the set of a relatively unsuccessful Turkish soap opera than on a West End stage. His agent had been delighted with the offer.
In the ample time afforded us
in the passport queue, Martin confessed that he was relieved to be leaving a deeply uncomfortable working routine that had seen him floundering in the midst of an all-Turkish-speaking cast and crew, mainly in the eastern town of Mardin. He had been playing the part of a roguish English ex-spy in Iran, and the first few episodes had required him to speak in English, plus some broken Turkish. As the series progressed, the producers (none other than Ay Yapım) had worried that the subtitles were turning viewers off, and he had to master subsequent dialogue in Turkish and Farsi. The production team was chaotic and the only person who could really communicate with him was the actor Philip Arditti, who trained at RADA and was in rather the same boat as him, but with the benefit of Turkish as a mother tongue.
I had previously heard of Philip through the drama scene in London and phoned him up to ask him what it was like working on Son. To my surprise, he told me that Son had been a risk for Ay Yapım, who had earmarked money especially for a slightly braver, mould-breaking dizi. They had drafted in a playwright in place of the usual formula-churning scriptwriters, and the gritty themes of drug smuggling, espionage and cross-border mafias are a far cry from the usual fare of unsuitable love matches and domestic wrangling. Son is relatively cutting edge – and correspondingly unpopular with the average housewife viewer.