Old friends revisited
Thirty years on, my illicit Sunday binge of Our Friends in the North lingers like a dream
- Caroline Frost
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I hope there’s a statute of limitations regarding VHS-related crime before I embark on this tale. Thirty years ago this week, BBC Two screened the majestic, moving finale of Our Friends in the North. Two months earlier, I’d watched the first episode with my flatmate Jane, and we became so engrossed that we decided we simply couldn’t wait for the rest. Here’s the mea culpa: we both worked in the BBC’s presentation department at the time, so we “borrowed” the precious preview tapes and spent one long, bleary Sunday watching the remaining eight episodes back to back.
As the final credits rolled, with the four young leads Gina McKee, Christopher Eccleston, Mark Strong and Daniel Craig now feeling more familiar to us than our cats, we sat back exhaus-ted. “Let’s get a video,” said Jane, which meant a trip to Blockbuster on Shepherd’s Bush Green. We’d been in there for less than a minute when the door opened and in walked two blokes who started chatting to us. They were Mark Strong and Daniel Craig. I thought I was hallucinating and Jane later told me she wasn’t sure it actually happened.
I have just rewatched the series, and it remains extraordinarily strong. Through that quartet of future stars and other big names like Peter Vaughan, David Bradley and Malcolm McDowell, writer Peter Flannery weaved the personal with the political to paint a social history of Britain through three decades. With pitch-perfect performances (and some famously imperfect wigs), Mary, Nicky, Tosker and Geordie grow from ambitious idealists of 1964 to disenchanted yet resilient survivors in 95. Producer Charlie Pattinson said of the characters: “You love and respect them, which means they could do anything.”
The stories behind the show are as vivid as the drama itself
Now, 30 years later, some of the stories behind the show remain as vivid as the drama itself. Flannery initially pitched an adaptation of his own play to Alan Yentob in a pub, offering a story “about British social housing policy”. It took 14 years, and an inspired BBC commissioner in Michael Wearing, to pull it into shape. Eccleston was initially offered the part of chancer Geordie, but realised he didn’t have the necessary swagger: “I couldn’t have competed with Daniel for sexiness and charisma.” Instead, he played political firebrand Nicky and earned a Bafta nomination. Meanwhile, as the last to be cast, future 007 Craig refused to audition after the fourth time, saying he couldn’t do any better. Pattinson remembered thinking, “There’s confidence,” and added, “wonder what happened to him...”
There were other bumps in the road. Original director Danny Boyle left after only a few weeks to make Trainspotting, the first and last episodes had to be rewritten due to budget constraints, and the screen rivalry between Nicky and Tosker (mostly ideological but also for Mary’s heart) was mirrored in real life. Eccleston revealed he and Mark Strong clashed on set but were sufficiently professional to make it work: “We were well cast in that respect – that’s as much as I’ll say.”
Daniel Craig went on to star as James Bond. Getty
There have been other state-of-the-nation dramas – from Edge of Darkness to State of Play via the glorious GBH – but Our Friends is still widely cited as the bridge between the era of the writer-led single play and the producer/accountant-led tableaux storytelling that followed. How relevant is it today? Housing policy, care homes, homelessness, corruption among the elite… The BBC could do worse than celebrate its birthday with another airing.
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A quick postscript: years after that surreal Sunday in 1996, I got to chat with Mark Strong and eventually asked whether that Blockbuster encounter could really have happened. “Oh yes,” he said straightaway, “we were in there all the time. Sunday evening was video night.”
Authors
Caroline Frost
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