Our Friends in the North is considered one of the best British television dramas ever made and launched the careers of its cast, including Christopher Eccleston and Daniel Craig. It has now been adapted for radio and updated with a new episode set in 2020.
The original series was a landmark in British television, uniting the fortunes of four friends from Newcastle over nine episodes set between 1964 and 1995.
When the show aired in 1996, it starred Eccleston as the idealistic Nicky, Gina McKee as the pragmatic Mary, Mark Strong as the rising Tosker, and Daniel Craig as the downtrodden Geordie.
“I hadn’t looked at it for years and years and years,” says its writer Peter Flannery, who has now revisited it to adapt it for BBC Radio 4.
“I think it held up pretty well. The writing was good, the production was exceptionally good, and the strength of the acting has kept it young.”
The show’s characters were pummeled by avant-garde stories that painted a bleak picture of a country with rotten political and police machinery.
Much was inspired by real-life events, such as a 1970s bribery scandal involving local politicians in the North East, a housing developer, and a Home Secretary; and the Westminster cash-for-questions affair of the 1990s.
Not much has changed, Flannery believes.
“The major issues of sleaze and corruption in local and national government have never gone away,” he says. “I think the spread of pornography and violence against women have gotten worse.
“And what I still find most worrying, and I did at the time, is the dire state the Metropolitan Police are in.”
Flannery often described Our Friends in the North as “a slick soap opera with something to say.” But he himself has not written the new episode. “I finished what I had to say.”
Instead, the tenth installment, which takes the story to 2020, has been penned by Manchester-born writer Adam Usden.
At 33, Usden was too young to appreciate the series when it first came out, but now recognizes it as “a stone-cold masterpiece.”
He says, “The scope and scale is staggering. Not just the time frame, but the breadth of the themes it deals with. At the same time, it’s incredibly intimate. Its heart is the focus on these hugely compelling themes, very compelling stories.” personal.
“It’s like a photograph: you somehow have the foreground and background in focus at the same time.”
Writing in The Guardian when the show turned 25 last year, Stuart Heritage agreed that it had stood the test of time. “Wow, it holds up: as a drama, as a commentary, as a time capsule, as a showcase for young talent.”
He added, “Sometimes watching a show about how bad things were in the last third of the 20th century from the perspective of 2021 makes you want to yell at the characters how great they have it.”
The original episodes were set against the backdrop of a different social or political event, such as the general election or the 1984 miners’ strike.
In his 2020 book The Age of Static: How Television Explains Modern Britain, Phil Harrison wrote that “the quartet felt like living, breathing representatives of us, as we grapple with the dilemmas of the times.”
The show “remains a resounding work to this day,” he said, “in part because, at its conclusion, there was still a sense that the baby boomer generation in its heart was not quite done with its upheavals.
“Two decades later, in the EU referendum in June 2016, to be precise, this suspicion would turn out to be well founded. The referendum would probably have split the four friends down the middle.”
It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Nicky and Mary arguing with Tosker over Brexit in the 2020 installment, with Geordie not knowing there was a referendum, but feeling the effects more.
“Those debates certainly slide into it,” says Usden. “One of the main story threads in this episode follows Tosker’s grandson, who was in the last scene of the previous series. He has a factory that ships parts and has been hit hard by the bureaucracy that is coming.”
Like Flanagan, Usden has tried to balance the personal and the political. One of the other big themes of the original was how parents affect, in other words, screw up, their children.
“I wanted to build on this sense of how the previous generation had shaped and impacted the people who had come after them in a way that no generation ever fully understood,” he says.
“It was almost the perfect story to be able to pick up 25 years later, and to be able to take those main characters of Tosker, Mary, Nicky and Geordie and show how they had shaped the next generation, sometimes intentionally and many times in ways that maybe they didn’t mean to.”
Flanagan says he “never really thought” about what might have happened to his four friends after the series ended.
“When I was asked at the time what happened to Geordie, I think my standard answer was, ‘He’ll probably be dead in a doorway in a couple of months.’
“He was broke. He has nothing to hold him up. He’s lost all his friends again. But I hadn’t really thought about that.”
If they are still alive, the quartet would be 70 years old by 2020. But Usden is reluctant to reveal what has become of them in his new episode.
“All of them, at least, are referenced in some way, and at all times, because it’s about their influence and their impact on those who came after them,” he says.
“I absolutely take into account the characters and story threads of the original series, but hopefully in some surprising way, and maybe not always the characters or stories you might expect.”
Our Friends in the North is on BBC Radio 4 on Thursdays at 2:15 p.m. on BBC Sounds.
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