Our Friends in the North is a British television drama serial produced by the BBC. It was originally broadcast in nine episodes on BBC2 in early 1996. Written by Peter Flannery, it tells the story of four friends from Newcastle upon Tyne over a period of 31 years, from 1964 to 1995. The story makes reference to certain political and social events which occurred during the era portrayed, some specific to Newcastle and others which affected Britain as a whole. These include general elections, police and local government corruption, the UK miners' strike of 1984–1985, and the Great Storm of 1987.

The serial is commonly regarded as one of the most successful BBC television dramas of the 1990s, described by The Daily Telegraph as "a production where all ... worked to serve a writer's vision. We are not likely to look upon its like again". It has been named by the British Film Institute as one of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century, by The Guardian as the third greatest television drama of all time and by Radio Times as one of the 40 greatest television programmes.

Plot

thumb|[[Christopher Eccleston (pictured in 2013) played Dominic 'Nicky' Hutchinson in Our Friends in the North, earning a BAFTA nomination for his performance.]]

In 1964 twenty-year-old university student Nicky Hutchinson (Christopher Eccleston) returns to Newcastle after volunteering for the summer in the U.S. civil rights movement. His friends Geordie (Daniel Craig) and Tosker (Mark Strong) are eager to start a band but Nicky rebuffs them as he is occupied with his volunteering work.

Nicky's girlfriend, Mary (Gina McKee), is also unhappy with his lack of attention and they drift apart. Tosker takes advantage of the situation and successfully woos Mary, getting her pregnant. Nicky is offered a job working for Austin Donohue (Alun Armstrong), a former council leader who is starting a PR and lobbying firm.

Nicky is impressed by Austin's apparent passion for change and he drops out of university to accept the job, to the dismay of his working-class father, Felix (Peter Vaughan). Geordie gets into a fight with his abusive, alcoholic father and runs away from home, abandoning his pregnant fiancée.

Now living in London, Geordie accepts a job offer from sleazy crime boss Benny Barratt (Malcolm McDowell) and begins working as his assistant in the Soho sex industry. Meanwhile Mary and Tosker struggle to adapt to their new married life. Their high-rise council flat, despite being brand new, is plagued by structural issues including rampant damp. Nicky is dismayed that Austin's firm is representing John Edwards, the owner of the company responsible for the sub-standard flats. After discovering records of the extensive bribery that took place in the project's development, Nicky resigns in protest. Austin later receives four years in prison for his involvement and Edwards is declared bankrupt. Tosker's dreams of becoming a professional musician rapidly fade after a brutal audition with a local talent scout. Dejected, he continues to do menial jobs to make ends meet. After visiting Geordie in London, he is given a loan from Benny and starts his own grocery business. Around this time, Geordie starts an affair with Benny's girlfriend, Julia.

Working as a photo journalist in London, Nicky's ideologies become extreme to the point he joins an anarchist terrorist cell. While lying low in Newcastle he is confronted by his parents and family friend, Eddie Wells (David Bradley), after his mother, Florrie (Freda Dowie), finds a submachinegun in his room. Despite his insistence he is in the right, his anarchist activities are brought to a sudden halt when the cell's hideout is raided by the police and everyone but him is arrested. Later Eddie runs as an independent Labour candidate in a Westminster by-election, after Felix agrees to be his campaign agent. Owing to Nicky's past ties to extremism, Eddie rejects his support, narrowly winning the seat nevertheless. Nicky eventually returns to mainstream politics in Newcastle and becomes a Labour parliamentary candidate himself. However, despite running in a safe Labour constituency and receiving an endorsement from Eddie, he manages to lose the seat to the Conservatives after a smear campaign depicts him as an IRA sympathiser.

In London the situation gets progressively more difficult for Benny's businesses as continued pressure from the Metropolitan Police (Met) Commissioner Colin Blamire (Peter Jeffrey) forces the heavily corrupt vice ("dirty") squad to reluctantly act. Meanwhile, tired of being repeatedly blackmailed by the dirty squad, one of Benny's men takes evidence of Met corruption to the Sunday papers and the resulting scandal forces the government to hold an independent inquiry. Roy Johnson (Tony Haygarth) is brought in from Newcastle as an outsider to run the investigation but is obstructed at every turn by Blamire, dirty squad Commander Harold Chapple (Donald Sumpter) and his henchman John Salway (David Schofield). Despite the setbacks, Johnson is able to present a report to the Home Secretary detailing extensive Met corruption. Blamire, however, is able to leverage a separate investigation into the Home Secretary's past business dealings to blackmail him into suppressing the inquiry findings. A disheartened Johnson returns to Newcastle to take early retirement. With the inquiry behind them, Benny and the dirty squad are free to reach new lucrative arrangements. Benny also has Geordie framed and imprisoned in revenge for the affair with Julia years before. Subsequent police investigations eventually bring down Chapple, Salway and many other corrupt Met officers.

Some years later Tosker is now a moderately successful businessman and Mary is occupied with her advocacy work. After Tosker's repeated infidelity, their marriage breaks down and he moves out to live with his new girlfriend, Elaine (Tracey Wilkinson). Nicky and Mary briefly reunite, but she is hesitant to resume their relationship out of concern for her young children. Out of prison and back living in Newcastle, Geordie is devastated to learn that Julia has been killed in an apparent accident. He aggressively questions Benny over her death but accepts Benny's argument that he had no motive to kill her. Eventually Geordie's casual drug dealing gets him in trouble with the law again and he departs for London a second time.

In 1984 Nicky is covering the ongoing miners' strike. After being injured in a brawl between the police and the miners, he rekindles his relationship with Mary. Tosker meanwhile has made his fortune as a slum landlord, straining his marriage with Elaine. At her urging, he sells the properties and invests heavily in stocks, which are subsequently wiped out in the 1987 market crash. Three years later, Nicky is struggling with his marriage to Mary and also with his father Felix who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. While in London, he needlessly picks a fight with Eddie Wells and starts an affair with a young student, Alice. He eventually separates from Mary to pursue Alice but by then she is not interested in a serious relationship. Geordie, who is now an alcoholic and living at a homeless shelter, sets fire to his bed in a moment of madness. Quickly apprehended, he is deemed a danger to society and is stunned when the judge sentences him to life in prison. Nicky reconciles with Eddie after he discovers Eddie's assistant is a mole for a PR company. Eddie resigns in embarrassment but as he is leaving Westminster he is caught up in the Great Storm of 1987 and dies of a heart attack. The storm also presents Geordie an opportunity to escape his prison transport but he chooses not to take it. In Newcastle, Mary initially refuses to run in the by-election for Eddie's seat but eventually changes her mind and is subsequently elected. Exasperated at Felix's increasingly outlandish behaviour, Florrie can no longer cope and she sends him to a care home.

Seven years later in 1995, Nicky has been living in Italy and returns to Newcastle to attend Florrie's funeral. Tosker and Elaine have slowly rebuilt their business and are on the eve of opening a new floating nightclub. Geordie has escaped from prison and approaches the club looking for work, where he is recognised by Elaine. Although Tosker and Elaine privately do not believe his story that he is out on parole, they take him in and give him a job playing keyboards for the opening night band. Nicky desperately tries to convince Felix that his life, in particular the Jarrow March, was not a failure, but Felix's mind is too far gone to understand. Geordie tries to attend the club launch event but is refused entry due to a miscommunication with the bouncers. Tosker fills in for the band at the last minute and finally achieves his dream of musical stardom, albeit on a small scale. The four friends reunite at Florrie's funeral for the first time for 31 years. Afterwards Tosker spends time with his grandchildren, Nicky decides to try and patch things up with Mary and Geordie walks off to an unknown fate.

Cast

  • Christopher Eccleston as Nicky Hutchinson
  • Mark Strong as Terry "Tosker" Cox
  • Gina McKee as Mary Cox
  • Daniel Craig as Geordie Peacock
  • Peter Vaughan as Felix Hutchinson
  • Freda Dowie as Florrie Hutchinson
  • David Bradley as Eddie Wells
  • Tracey Wilkinson as Elaine Cox (née Craig)
  • Alun Armstrong as Austin Donohue
  • Malcolm McDowell as Benny Barratt
  • Donald Sumpter as Harold Chapple
  • David Schofield as John Salway
  • Peter Jeffrey as Commissioner Blamire
  • Tony Haygarth as Roy Johnson
  • Stephanie Putson as Bernadette Cox (teenager)
  • Emma Lightfoot as Bernadette Cox (young)
  • Julian Fellowes as Claud Seabrook
  • Danny Webb as Detective Inspector Ron Conrad
  • John Dair as Charlie Dawson
  • Trevor Cooper as DCS Dennis Cockburn
  • Geoffrey Hutchings as John Edwards
  • Frank Couchman as Patrick Soulsby
  • Elspeth Charlton as Mrs Soulsby
  • Jack McBride as Mr Soulsby
  • Anne Orwin as Mrs Sandra Weightman
  • Daniel Casey as Anthony Cox
  • Nick Figgis as Anthony Cox (teenager)
  • Saskia Wickham as Claudia Seabrook
  • Angeline Ball as Daphne
  • Chris Walker as DCI Paul Boyd
  • William Hoyland as Commander Arthur Fieldson
  • Pete Lee-Wilson as Colin Butler
  • Larry Lamb as Alan Roe
  • Anna Maria Donofrio as Frances
  • Harriet Keevil as Helen Windsor
  • Granville Saxton as Commissioner Jellicoe
  • Louise Salter as Julia (Jules) Allen
  • Siobhan Burke as Lucille
  • Paul Greenwood as Ray Bennett
  • Charlie Hardwick as Paula Bennett
  • Mary Woodvine as Alison
  • Colette Brown as Alice MacDonald
  • Jean Heywood as woman at the market
  • Pearce Quigley as Detective
  • Jean Southern as Mrs Rashleigh
  • Miriam Stockley as singer
  • Libby Davison as Sarah
  • Gavin Muir as Father Kyle
  • Doreen Mantle as Mrs Wilson
  • Sophia Diaz as Mercedes
  • Margery Bone as Barbara Cox
  • Melvyn Barnes as Sean Collins
  • Joanne Macinnes as Francine Volker
  • Angela Bruce as Nursing sister
  • Harry Herring as Arthur Watson

Episodes

Background

Stage play

thumb|[[Northumberland Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, pictured in 1969 before it was pedestrianised. Life in Newcastle in the 1960s was a major influence on Peter Flannery's writing of Our Friends in the North.|alt=A busy urban street in Newcastle in the late 1960s. There are tall buildings on either side of the street, and various 1960s cars and buses on the road.]]

Our Friends in the North was originally written by the playwright Peter Flannery for the theatre, while he was a writer in residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). The idea came to Flannery while he was watching the rehearsals for the company's production of Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1980; the scale of the plays inspired him to come up with his own historical epic.

In its original form the story went up only to the 1979 general election and the coming to power of the new Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher. The play also contained a significant number of scenes set in Rhodesia, chronicling UDI, the oil embargo and the emergence of armed resistance to white supremacy. This plot strand was dropped from the televised version, although the title Our Friends in the North, a reference to how staff at BP in South Africa referred to the Rhodesian government of Ian Smith, remained.

Flannery was heavily influenced not only by his own political viewpoints and life experiences but also by the actual history of his home city of Newcastle during the 1960s and 1970s. Characters such as Austin Donohue and John Edwards were directly based on the real-life scandals of T. Dan Smith and John Poulson. Flannery contacted Smith and explained that he was going to write a play based on the events of the scandal, to which Smith replied, "There is a play here of Shakespearean proportions."

1980s attempts at production

The stage version of Our Friends in the North was seen by BBC television drama producer Michael Wearing in Newcastle in 1982, and he was immediately keen on producing a television adaptation. At that time, Wearing was based at the BBC English Regions Drama Department at BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham, which had a specific remit for making "regional drama". Wearing initially approached Flannery to adapt his play into a four-part television serial for BBC2, with each episode being 50 minutes long and the Rhodesian strand dropped for practical reasons. A change of executives meant that the project was not produced, although Wearing persisted in trying to get it commissioned. Flannery extended the serial to six episodes, However, by this point in the mid-1980s, Michael Grade was Director of Programmes for BBC Television, and he had no interest in the project.

By 1989, Wearing had been recalled to the central BBC drama department in London where he was made Head of Serials. This new seniority eventually allowed him to further the cause of Our Friends in the North. Flannery wrote to the BBC's then managing director of television, Will Wyatt, "accusing him of cowardice for not approving it." The BBC was concerned not only with the budget and resources that would be required to produce the serial, but also with potential legal issues. Much of the background story was based on real-life events and people, such as Smith and Poulson and former Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, upon whom another character, Claud Seabrook, was based. According to The Observer newspaper, one senior BBC lawyer, Glen Del Medico, even threatened to resign if the production was made. Others tried to persuade Flannery to reset the piece "in a fictional country called Albion rather than Britain." As Wearing was now a head of department at the BBC, he was too busy overseeing other projects to produce Our Friends in the North. George Faber was briefly attached to the project as producer before he moved on to become Head of Single Drama at the BBC.

When Yentob was succeeded as controller of BBC Two by Michael Jackson, Pattinson was able to persuade him to commission full production on the series. This was in spite of the fact that Jackson and Wearing were not close and did not get on; Pattinson took to dealing with Jackson directly. Flannery later commented that: "The project has undoubtedly benefited from the delay. I'm not sure I have".

Production and broadcast

thumb|left|[[Daniel Craig (pictured in 2015) played George 'Geordie' Peacock, one of the four main characters in Our Friends in the North. It was one of his first major starring roles on British television.|alt=Daniel Craig at the Berlin premiere of Spectre in October 2015.]]

The scale of Our Friends in the North required BBC Two controller Michael Jackson to devote a budget of £8 million to the production, which was half of his channel's drama serials budget for the entire year. Producer Charles Pattinson attempted to gain co-production funding from overseas broadcasters, but met with a lack of interest. Pattinson believed it was because the story was so much about Britain and had limited appeal to other countries. BBC Worldwide, the corporation's commercial arm which sold its programmes overseas, offered only £20,000 of funding towards the production.

Directors

The first director approached to helm the production by Michael Wearing was Danny Boyle. Boyle was keen to direct all nine episodes, but Pattinson believed that one director taking charge of the entire serial would be too punishing a schedule for whoever was chosen. Boyle had recently completed work on the feature film Shallow Grave and wanted to see how that film was received before committing to Our Friends in the North. Sir Peter Hall was also briefly considered, but he too had other production commitments. Peter Flannery was concerned that Urban's directorial style was not suited to the material that he had written. McKee was concerned that she would not be given the part after an unsuccessful makeup test where efforts to make her appear to be in her 50s resulted in her resembling a drag queen. Initially, Eccleston had been considered by the production team as a candidate to play Geordie, but he was more interested in playing Nicky, whom he saw as a more emotionally complex character. Mark Strong worked on the Geordie accent by studying episodes of the 1980s comedy series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, which featured lead characters from Newcastle. Strong later claimed that Christopher Eccleston took a dislike to him and outside of their scenes together the pair did not speak while the series was filming. All of McDowell's scenes were shot by Stuart Urban as part of the first block of filming; the rest of the production was filmed roughly chronologically. Christopher Eccleston also went on to achieve success as a long-running, well-known fictional character when he appeared as the Ninth Doctor in the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who in 2005. Since then various media articles have noted the coincidence of the future James Bond and Doctor Who leads having co-starred in the same production earlier in their careers.

Episode one re-shoot

thumb|[[Mark Strong (pictured in 2010) played Terry 'Tosker' Cox across thirty years of his life in Our Friends in the North, from a young man in 1964 to middle-age in 1995.|alt=A head-and-shoulders view of a bald middle-aged Strong, wearing a dark shirt and black jacket.]]

After Stuart Urban left the production and the decision had been made to re-shoot some of the material that he had completed with Pedr James directing, producer Charles Pattinson suggested to Peter Flannery that the first episode should not simply be remade, but also rewritten. Flannery took the opportunity to completely change the opening storyline, introducing the love story element between Nicky and Mary earlier. This was introduced in later episodes of the television version, but had not been part of the original play. This led to some critics mockingly referring to the production as Our Friends in the South. The BBC's existing agreements with various music publishers and record labels meant that the production team was easily able to obtain the rights to use most of the desired songs. The episode lengths varied, with 1966 being the shortest at 63 minutes, 48 seconds and 1987 the longest at 74 minutes, 40 seconds.

The first episode of Our Friends in the North gained 5.1 million viewers on its original transmission. In terms of viewing figures, the series was BBC2's most successful weekly drama for five years.

Reception

Critical response

thumb|left|The floating nightclub [[Tuxedo floating nightclubs|Tuxedo Princess beneath the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle, pictured in 2005. Both of these locations feature prominently in Our Friends in the North.|alt=An iron bridge with a semi-circular upper structure, over the river Tyne. Beneath the bridge is a large white boat with several decks.]]

Both during and after its original transmission on BBC2, the serial was generally praised by the critics. Reviewing the first episode in The Observer newspaper, Ian Bell wrote: "Flannery's script is faultless; funny, chilling, evocative, spare, linguistically precise. The four young friends about to share 31 hellish years in the life of modern Britain are excellently played."

The conclusion of the serial in March brought similar praise. "Our Friends in the North confounded the gloomier predictions about its content and proved that there was an audience for political material, provided that it found its way to the screen through lives imagined in emotional detail ... It will be remembered for an intimate sense of character, powerful enough to make you forgive its faults and stay loyal to the end,"

However, the response was not exclusively positive. In The Independent on Sunday, columnist Lucy Ellmann criticised both what she saw as the unchanging nature of the characters and Flannery's concentration on friendship rather than family. "What's in the water there anyway? These are the youngest grandparents ever seen! Nothing has changed about them since 1964 except a few grey hairs ... It's quite impressive that anything emotional could be salvaged from this nine-part hop, skip and jump through the years. In fact we still hardly know these people – zooming from one decade to the next has a distancing effect," she wrote of the former point. And of the latter, "Peter Flannery seems to want to suggest that friendships are the only cure for a life blighted by deficient parents. But all that links this ill-matched foursome in the end is history and sentimentality. The emotional centre of the writing is still in family ties." The academic Georgina Born, writing in 2004, also felt that although the serial had its strengths, it also contained "involuntary marks of pastiche" in its treatment of social realism. At the same ceremony, Gina McKee won the Best Actress category. Both Christopher Eccleston and Peter Vaughan (who played Nicky's father, Felix) were nominated for the Best Actor award for their performances in Our Friends in the North, but they lost to Nigel Hawthorne for his role in The Fragile Heart. Also at the 1997 BAFTAs, Peter Flannery was presented with the honorary Dennis Potter Award for his work on the serial. Our Friends in the North also gained BAFTA nominations for costume design, sound, and photography and lighting.

The Royal Television Society Awards covering the year 1996 saw Our Friends in the North win the Best Drama Serial category, and Peter Flannery was given the Writer's Award. Peter Vaughan also gained another Best Actor nomination for his role as Felix.

In the United States, Our Friends in the North was awarded a Certificate of Merit in the Television Drama Miniseries category at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1997. In January 2010, the website of The Guardian newspaper produced a list of "The top 50 TV dramas of all time," in which Our Friends in the North was ranked in third position.

Legacy

Following the success of Our Friends in the North, Flannery proposed a "kind of prequel" to the serial under the title of Our Friends in the South. This would have told the story of the Jarrow March. Although the BBC initially took up the project, it did not progress to script stage and was eventually abandoned. It received a second repeat run on the BBC ten years after its original broadcast, running on BBC Four from 8 February to 29 March 2006.

In April 1997, the serial was released on VHS by BMG Video in two sets, 1964 – 1974 and 1979 – 1995. In 2002, BMG released the series on DVD, which along with the original episodes contained several extra features, including a retrospective discussion of the series by Wearing, Pattinson, Flannery, James and Cellan Jones, and specially shot interviews with Eccleston and McKee. Simply Media brought out a second DVD release of the serial in September 2010, although on this occasion there were no extra features. This edition contained an edit not present on the 2002 BMG release; most of the song "Don't Look Back in Anger" by Oasis is removed at the end of the final episode, fading out early and the credits instead running in silence. The 2001 BBC Two drama serial In a Land of Plenty was previewed by The Observer newspaper as being "the most ambitious television drama since Our Friends in the North." The writer Paula Milne drew inspiration from Our Friends in the North for her own White Heat (2012); she felt that Our Friends in the North had been too centred on white, male, heterosexual characters and she deliberately wanted to counter that focus. The original stage version of Our Friends in the North was revived in Newcastle by Northern Stage in 2007, with 14 cast members playing 40 characters. In August 2016, Flannery was interviewed for an event, part of the Whitley Bay Film Festival, that celebrated the 20th anniversary of the series being broadcast. In February 2026, Flannery and Eccleston attended the showing of an episode from the series at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle to mark the show's 30th anniversary,.

Radio

In February 2022, it was announced that Peter Flannery had revived and rewritten Our Friends in the North for BBC Radio 4, with a tenth episode, written by Adam Usden, set in Newcastle in 2020.