THE DAY IN APRIL 1984 when I resigned as producer of Spitting Image was one of the worst of my life. I’d banked an awful lot on the show I helped to create. I believed a) it would be the best and funniest comedy show in TV history; and b) a splendid way to return home after 20 years in New York. I was dead right about a) and dead wrong about b).

A few days later my wife-to-be and I escaped to Crete. We stayed near Ag Nik in a wild warren of rooms scooped out of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. It was an impossibly evocative, romantic place, but it couldn’t dispel a sense that my life was in ruins. Nor could the bouzouki-fuelled midnight feasts on the beach.

Then one evening as we were exploring the craggy interior of the island, around a narrow mountain road came a procession. A mist was gathering and at first it seemed to be just an Orthodox priest carrying a purple-draped crucifix and flanked by a couple of thurible-swinging acolytes; but gradually a whole village of Cretans materialised behind them, singing softly in the gloaming. Enchanted, we tagged along until round another bend the procession halted at a place overlooking a long valley containing several little villages. Everyone fell silent and then, from the onion-shaped church spires sprouting from each village, came the amplified voices of priests chanting verses back and forth, the stately Greek words echoing around the rocky hillsides, as ancient and ethereal as the mist.

We’d stumbled upon the Orthodox Holy Week. It was Good Friday; this was the Orthodox version of a ritual I’d participated in as a boy, in which priest and congregation act out the Passion. I was a long-lapsed Catholic in those days, but for the first time in months the stew of rage and disappointment I’d been wallowing in evaporated. The obsessive cares of television shows seemed unimportant compared with the timeless drama being enacted before us.

I don’t mean I had a religious experience. But I was reconnecting to one of the great narratives of the planet. The Easter story — the Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection — is a terrific one, full of action, arrest, good guys, bad guys, conflicted guys (Pilate, Peter), double-crosses (Judas, the Jerusalem mob), R-rated violence (flogging, torture, the carrying of the cross) and ending with a spectacular death scene — all the more gripping because the good guy dies. Made that much more authentic by brilliant touches such as Veronica offering Jesus the cloth to wipe his face, the soldiers dicing for his robe under the Cross, the bad thief crucified beside Jesus who tells the savior of the universe to get lost (which I always thought took real guts — far more than the obsequious good thief who had nothing to lose).

And though the tragedy seems complete, the curtain doesn’t fall there. After dark nights of misery and loss, Mary Magdalen and her friends approach the tomb and find that the rock has been rolled back, the tomb’s empty and the body’s gone! A missing corpse? A whiff of comedy after the tragedy, as Mary and the guys chase frantically around looking for help or information or the corpse, when suddenly, up it pops, alive! And they’re so amazed they think it’s the gardener! Another brilliant touch.

The resurrection of Jesus is a pay-off that out-Hollywoods the Hollywood ending: all the flooding emotion of a tragedy followed by all the bubbling joy of a comedy. Not just to live happily ever after; but to die — and still live happily ever after.

It’s the most audacious claim of Christianity, the one element that marks the brand indelibly, that trumps the claims of all other major faiths. Even if you don’t believe in it, you can respond to the sweetness of the vision. For resurrection would be the miracle of miracles. That a loved face lost would stir and blink and smile again: a joy impossible to measure.

There is the atavistic appeal to Easter: coming at a time of year when eggs appear magically in nests, when green buds sticky with life push somehow from dead wood. But its enduring power, the mysterious way the Easter season has always, even in my most apostate years, put the trivial and troubling into perspective is because it posits the mad possibility that death — the great inescapable fact of life — was at least once in our collective history overthrown, and dares to hope that a time and place might yet again exist where death has no dominion.

Curiously, of all the Gospel stories I find the Resurrection to be the most vivid and real. I always find myself on Easter Day mentally computing how many times this tragedy with the happy ending has been celebrated. It’s not that many when you think about it. This year it will be 1,973 times (2006 minus 33 for Christ’s age) a graspable, tangible figure from which you can count backwards until there you are, back at zero and it’s actually happening, early one morning in a city called Jerusalem, which is still there at the other end of the Mediterranean. Just 1,973 of these mornings ago — a woman and two men rushing wildly around the burial ground looking for their friend’s body and bumping into . . . the gardener.

Resurrexit sicut dixit. Alleluia.

Tony Hendra is the author of Father Joe. He played Ian Faith in This is Spinal Tap

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