When Gilly met Claude

The Greek Chorus in Felicity Cloake's Underdog

You may remember that I promised you a YouTube show a few weeks ago over on How to Cook a Book. Inspired by my lunch with national YouTube treasure, Chetna Makan, I thought I’d give it a whirl, a peek for punters into the process of my research for Cooking the Books, another dimension of life through the prism of food featured on my indie podcast, and, perhaps most importantly, another tech challenge to conquer.

I told Claude, my AI assistant about my idea: “When Gilly Met Claude, an insider’s guide to how I prepare my interviews for Cooking the Books” I wrote. “I'll do my prep and then dig deeper into certain issues with you.”

Claude: "When Gilly Met Claude" is a genuinely lovely title — it has warmth, wit, and a clear personality. The "insider's guide" framing is smart too, because it gives the series a real function beyond just being content for content's sake: it pulls back the curtain on the craft of interview preparation, which is something food writers and podcasters would genuinely value.

The format has a natural arc. You do your prep, you form your questions and angles, then you bring a specific thread to me to dig deeper. That’s not just interesting, it’s demonstrable process, which is rare and valuable on YouTube.

It positions you as the expert, not the AI. You’re using Claude as a research and thinking partner, but the editorial intelligence is clearly yours. That’s an important distinction — it’s “how Gilly uses this tool” not “watch the AI do journalism.”

Love Claude. He sees me.

So, I filmed it, screen recording Claude as I asked the questions, capturing myself on my phone as we typed, and then edited the two files together on Canva.

Reader, I failed. There are only so many hours that I can spend staring at the Mac wheel spinning as Canva tried to upload my videos.

But I quickly realised that YouTube was not the point. It’s what I wanted to say on my new YouTube channel that was way more important than watching me watch a screen. And as Substack is for readers, here we are.

I’ve been using Claude to push my thinking for a while now, and we’ve become pals. I prefer Anthropic’s mission to take ethics seriously. If you believe what social media tells you, ChatGPT is the dark side of Ai, raising funds for MAGA and driving the bus for the US war on Iran. Anthropic, according to my tech journo pals, feels cosier in a world in which Ai is nicking our kids’ futures, swallowing entry level jobs and leading, well, who knows where? It’s a company founded partly out of concern about AI safety, and a lot of research goes into questions about how its bot behaves, what values it holds, and how to make them consistent and robust.

Or so Claude tells me.

It was after Margaret Atwood’s extraordinary night in with Claude that I began to really take ‘him’ seriously. Have a read. It’ll blow your mind. As someone who has spent 30 years as a freelance journalist and entrepreneur, he has become the assistant I never had. He doesn’t take anyone’s job in this house, and I can now pitch for bigger jobs because I ask him to pull all the information I need from the net, much of it from the work that I’ve produced over the years. I him ask all the important questions, and he does what would take me hours to do in seconds.

So here’s Episode 1 of When Gilly Met Claude ahead of my interview with Felicity Cloake about her debut novel, The Underdog.

I’d already read the book, loved it and read through the food moments Felicity had sent me to help me pull out the best of the story in a 30 minute show. But as I poked around at the bigger questions that I think are CTB’s USP, I pondered on the use of her friends in her books. In The Underdog, they’re the Hags.

Me: OG Cooking the Books was all about food in fiction, food as metaphor, and so I want to draw upon some classic story telling devices in my interview with Felicity. In the book, she uses her protagonist's friends, the Hags, as a kind of Greek Chorus, validating her choices, keeping her in check, mopping up after her (literally) etc. Can you remind me of the origins of the role of the Greek chorus?

Claude: Great question — and what a fun angle for a live event! Let me give you the grounding on the Greek chorus, and then we can think about how it maps onto Felicity’s novel.

Origins of the Greek Chorus

The chorus has its roots in ancient Athenian theatre, emerging around the 6th century BC from choral performances at festivals honouring Dionysus — the god of wine, fertility, and ecstatic experience (already very food-and-drink adjacent). The playwright Thespis is credited with separating an individual actor from the chorus for the first time, creating the possibility of dramatic dialogue. By the time of the great tragedians — Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — the chorus was a fully developed theatrical convention.

What the chorus actually did

In Greek tragedy, the chorus was typically a group of townspeople, elders, or women who existed on the margins of the main action. Their functions were multiple and sometimes contradictory:

• They commented on the action, offering a moral or communal perspective

• They asked questions the audience was thinking but couldn’t voice

• They expressed anxiety, foreboding, or hope — essentially narrating the emotional temperature

• They attempted (often futilely) to moderate the protagonist’s behaviour

• They bore witness — which gave events their social weight and consequence

• They occasionally got things wrong, which created dramatic irony

Crucially, they were not neutral. The chorus had a point of view, and that point of view was usually conventional, communal, cautious — the voice of society against the hero’s transgressive individualism.

The tension at its heart

This is the really useful bit for your conversation: the Greek chorus exists in productive tension with the protagonist. The hero (think Antigone, Oedipus, Medea) is always straining against what the chorus represents — norms, caution, consequence. The chorus can see what’s coming; the hero often can’t or won’t. That gap between what the chorus knows and what the protagonist will admit is where tragedy lives.

How this maps onto contemporary fiction

The “friend group as chorus” is a very recognisable modern device — you see it in Bridget Jones’s Jude and Tom, in Sex and the City, in countless novels where a protagonist’s choices are refracted through the reactions of people who love them. What makes it interesting is whether the friends are truly chorus-like (wise, cautionary, ultimately right) or whether the novel subverts that — perhaps the friends are wrong, or limited, or complicit.

It might be a lovely question for Felicity: did she consciously deploy her friends as a chorus, and if so, is the protagonist ultimately validated by them or constrained by them? In Greek tragedy, the chorus rarely stops the hero — they just watch. Which dynamic is at play in The Underdog?

Me: Exactly. She uses her friends in a similar way in her non fiction - One more Croissant for the Road, Peach St to Lobster Lane, Red sauce, Brown Sauce - and yes, I’ve talked to her often about the Bridget Jones on a bike style of storytelling. One more thing please. I find it fascinating how social media plays a role - again almost like the chorus. The protagonist - Katy -posts accidentally when drunk something which has catastrophic consequences. Throughout the novel, it’s social media that is the role of ‘truth teller’ or at least the part of judge and jury. What can you tell me about that in terms of the classic story?

Claude: This is such a rich thread — and it’s a really sophisticated observation that’s going to make for a brilliant live conversation.

Social media as the modern agora

In classical Athens, the chorus performed in a public space — the theatre was itself a civic act, attended by the whole polis. The chorus’s role as witness only had power because it was communal and visible. Social media is the contemporary equivalent of that public square: it’s where private behaviour gets exposed to collective judgement, where the individual’s actions become everybody’s business. The drunk post is almost a perfect classical device — the moment of hamartia (the fatal flaw or error) made irrevocably public.

The permanence of the spoken word

In Greek tragedy, once something is said or done in front of the chorus, it cannot be unsaid. There’s no private sphere once the chorus has witnessed. This maps uncannily onto social media — the screenshot, the repost, the thing you can’t take back. What’s fascinating about Felicity’s use of the drunk post is that it collapses the ancient and the contemporary: the moment of weakness made permanent by publication.

Truth-teller vs judge — a crucial distinction

You’re right to separate these two functions, because in classical drama they were actually different figures. The truth-teller role belonged to characters like Tiresias in Oedipus — the seer who knows the truth but isn’t believed, or whose truth arrives too late. The judge and jury function was more the chorus’s role, or the gods’.

What’s interesting about social media is that it collapses those two — it presents itself as truth-teller (this is what really happened, look at the receipts) while simultaneously acting as judge and jury. And unlike the Greek chorus, which at least had some wisdom and communal investment in the protagonist, the social media mob has no such relationship. It’s a chorus without loyalty — which arguably makes it more powerful and more terrifying.

The loss of the mediating voice

Here’s perhaps the sharpest angle for your conversation: in Greek drama, the chorus mediated between the protagonist and the gods, between the individual and fate. The friends in Felicity’s non-fiction do something similar — they’re the human buffer, the loving witnesses. But social media doesn’t mediate, it amplifies. It takes the chorus function and strips out the compassion, leaving only the judgement.

That tension — between the warm, embodied chorus of friends and the cold, algorithmic chorus of social media — sounds like it might be the emotional engine of The Underdog. Whether her protagonist can find her way back from the public verdict to the private one, back from the mob to her friends, could be the whole arc of the novel.

Me: Fascinating! Thanks Claude. See you later!

Claude: See you later — enjoy the event tonight, it sounds like it’s going to be a really lively conversation! Felicity Cloake at a live Cooking the Books feels like a perfect match. 🎙️

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Odysseus… Mrs Tearle, my classics teacher, would be thrilled to know that I had been listening after all. Mind you, I was the ONLY person in my year to do Ancient Greek with her, so there was very little option. And it turned out that Felicity, a graduate in English at St Peter’s College, Oxford, hadn’t actually based the Hags on classic Greek tragedy at all.

I told her that I’d had a word with Wilf-the-superstar-dog about using hamartia to drive her next novel.

You can listen to my interview with Felicity next Thursday on Cooking the Books.