At Athens airport, the digital noticeboard reads like the script of an agitprop play. ‘Strike, strike, strike, strike, strike,’ it announces, next to the destinations. ‘Due to the turmoil,’ says the PR person we’re talking to, ‘all the politicians you’ve flown in to interview have pulled out.’ My cameraman, driving the Audi, seems determined to break the world land-speed record between Athens and Patras, but is thwarted by the fact that the 21st-century motorway is blocked by a mudslide. This means travelling on the 20th-century road, which is really a 3rd-century bc road lined with concrete and graffiti. At Derveni, a strip of crumbling concrete villas, we find the one restaurant that is not closed. ‘There used to be ten of us, now there’s just three,’ says the manager, flipping switches to bring the heating and the folk music to life. We’re the only customers. The food is delicious but basic: garlic-laden lamb shank, together with a plate of lemons cut in halves, and a plate of beetroot cut into slices. ‘We used to be a stop-off for lawyers, doctors, engineers,’ he says. But now ‘they don’t really earn any money’. That’s a euphemism: in 2010 the Greek government raided hundreds of dentists and doctors in Athens and found, to nobody’s amazement, lots of people with €30k cars whose claimed taxable income was €30k.
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In Patras we interview illegal migrants. Mohammed leads me into a yard where the amenities are a hosepipe and the pit of an old weighbridge. He whips a book by Jean-Paul Sartre from his bomber jacket. ‘I admire Sartre,’ he says. ‘Sartre, Marx, Hegel and Nietzsche.’ He’s from Agadir, where he did his masters in sociology. He wants to go to France, but the Patras port police have other ideas. The men crowd round us, showing off their scars, buckshot wounds and bruises from numerous encounters with the ‘commandoes’, the Greek port police. Another man, an Afghan, tells me he was arrested in Manchester, deported to Kabul but has made it back here. He intends to return to Britain. ‘I’ve been to Europe, man,’ he says in a broad north London accent. ‘Greece? This is not Europe. This is Asia.’
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On Sunday, we interview the grassroots of Greece’s growing political force: the left. A social worker, a language teacher, a mechanical engineer and a carpenter have formed an ad hoc ‘collectivity’ to take food and blankets to the migrants. What’s the probable outcome of the Greek crisis, I ask them. ‘Civil war,’ says the engineer. After a short sleep, we tank it back along the reopened motorway in time for the riot. The demo starts at 6 p.m. The vote is set for midnight. Because Greek crowds can be hostile to news crews, we start by filming the communist trade unions, who are always orderly, polite and tolerant. They form up, with about 50 burly men at the front, with thick wooden poles, red flags and crash helmets. The sticks, says a Greek journalist, are for dealing with the anarchists.
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But the anarchists have beaten them to Syntagma Square. It becomes clear, via Twitter, that things have kicked off. We move through the crowd and reach the front, where about 200 masked youths are throwing petrol bombs and flares at the riot police, who are lobbing back flashbangs and tear gas. Tear gas is no bother, if you have a standard-issue BBC gas mask. Unless, that is, you also have to wear a pair of reading glasses to see your iPhone. Then it’s a problem. We film from a distance of 20 yards: I stand nonchalantly in front of my cameraman, shielding the camera, and he shoots. Pictures gathered, we retreat. But in the crowd of non-combatants the frustration is palpable. Unfortunately, a small knot of right-wing protesters decide my blond-haired producer is German. They grab our camera, they grab him, they shout loudly against the Germans. A textbook BBC safety-course rolling maul begins around more than ten grand’s worth of camera. My microphone gets ripped off. The training tells you to run away, which works until a kid in a mask blocks my path: ‘Where are you from?’ England. ‘Then what’s the f**kin’ problem?’ he laughs, and they let me go. By 10 p.m., big fires are burning. At the National Library we get caught in a police charge, and a teargas grenade lands at our feet. I become a blithering, disoriented, snot-coated thing crawling on hands and knees across rain-smeared tarmac. The crowd around looks at me as they would at a recently deceased dog.
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I like Exarchia because it’s the last great European remnant of bohemia. It has dives, graffiti, riot police, junkies and earnest philosophical discourse conducted by young men sitting on crates wearing hooded tops. By midnight on Sunday, Exarchia is full of off-duty rioters munching kebabs, exhausted, white-faced from the Maalox cream they wear to counteract the gas. Very early the next morning my editor rings: the idea of making a long midweek piece is abandoned in favour of making a short, scrappy one for tonight. Eighteen hours later it is done — as ‘track and rushes’. Track and rushes is the TV equivalent of sending, say, an essay, or a stage play, word by word, to someone else, and letting that person assemble it, blind, into the story you intended. We take a taxi out to Piraeus, a port to the south of Athens, to look for a bar. It looks like the setting of a Greek version of The Sopranos. A line of yachts with little ‘for sale’ signs taped to their transoms bump against the harbour walls. Since the tax authorities started raiding marinas, there’s been a flurry of knock-down boat sales.
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On Tuesday, I interview a small business owner, a cabinet-maker in his sixties, who thinks Greece needs ‘a Thatcher’. What does he tell his kids? ‘I tell them politicians are bastards. Go into the ballot box and just write against each name: bastard, bastard, bastard.’