Old Friends

I don’t remember how much of Our Friends in the North I saw first time around. I am sure that it wasn’t all of it – I am pretty certain I didn’t see the whole thing until it was repeated the following year. But I do know that I saw at least some of it on that first run in early 1996; and I know that something about it really drew me in.

 
It seems ridiculous to think back on. I was only 11 years old when it started – I turned 12 halfway through the run. A birthday which brought the disappointing gift of an office chair, which even at the time felt like some sort of indication that childhood was now well and truly over.
 
Our Friends in the North of course wasn’t aimed at me or anyone remotely like me, and I had no real conception of the wider background and politics behind its writing. Newcastle and London, the two cities in which the story is mainly set, were far-off places I knew little of. Probably the main thing I knew about Newcastle at the time was that its football team was, at that point, leading the Premier League and looking likely to win it that season. Oh, and that the people who lived there were referred to as ‘Geordies’, of course.
 
But none of that really mattered. its author Peter Flannery himself has said, and was saying as far back as 1988, that what really mattered in this story were the characters, and it was their stories which fascinated me. Particularly Nicky, played by Christopher Eccleston, but I wanted to know what happened to all four of the leads, and in all of the supporting plotlines, too. Our Friends in the North had that most vital element for any story – it made me want to know what happened next.
 
I loved it still when I saw it again on DVD a few years later – in 2002, I think, a blink of an eye in some ways but a huge leap from 12 to 18. It’s always remained one of my all-time favourite dramas, and I think one of the greatest things ever produced by the BBC. It made me follow particularly Eccleston’s career with interest, and was a major reason I was so excited in 2004 when he was cast in the lead in Doctor Who.
 
So it’s long been a series I’ve been very interested in. I even created and wrote most of its Wikipedia page some years ago, back when I was heavily into doing that sort of thing – probably about 20 years ago, now. I used to do a lot of editing on Wikipedia, particularly on British television history, but while I enjoyed adding information and helping to create accurate pages about subjects in which I was interested, ultimately I drifted away from it as being slightly unsatisfying. I have too much an ego not to want my writing to be entirely mine under my name, and once it’s done I want it to stay as I wrote it, not to be able to be instantly replaced by someone else’s idea of how it should read. I do still use Wikipedia a lot and go in and fix errors where I spot them, but I haven’t done any actual substantial writing for it for a very long time.
 
Anyway, it didn’t seem likely that Our Friends in the North would ever cross paths with my professional career until last year when I realised of course that the 30^th anniversary of the programme was coming up this January. John Escolme, the History of the BBC manager, is always very kindly receptive to ideas for feature pieces for the website, so last summer I pitched him the idea of an Our Friends in the North 30^th anniversary piece to go up on the 30^th anniversary, January 15^th.

 

Knowing, from the DVD extras and Michael Eaton’s BFI book on the series from back in 2005, just how much drama there had been behind-the-scenes in actually getting the programme into production, I was confident there would be some interesting things to say about it. John agreed, and I was able to go down to Caversham a couple of times in the autumn to look through some of the extensive amount of paperwork the BBC Written Archives hold on the series.
 
Actually, though, it ended up being a slightly different article to the one I had originally thought I might write. Yes, some of those tales of the long delays to production are present in the files and are in the piece. But actually, it became less about that story – which is, after all, comparatively well-known – and more about what was happening in the BBC itself at the time. This was the era of ‘Producer Choice’, the Production / Broadcast split, and the beginning of the gradual closing down of the ‘television factory’ which the BBC had once been.

 
Obviously though there’s only so far you can go with that, in terms of both the amount of detail you can fit into a 1500-word article and the amount you want to put into what is, after all, supposed to be an article for a fairly general audience. But I was pleased with what I was able to do with it.

 

The piece seems to have gone down very well since it went online for the anniversary on Thursday, anyway. I’ve had various nice responses, both from within the BBC and via social media, and it’s certainly been one of the most widely-shared online pieces I’ve written, with the BBC Archive social accounts’ posts about it getting a lot of response. Now, admittedly I have no way of knowing how many of those people actually clicked through to the article to have a read of it, rather than just wanting to share or react to the post and image, but still – it’s a good sign!

 

I was also able to get a little bit of broadcasting out of it. Back in 2023 when I was the guest for CNS two-ways across BBC Local Radio for the Doctor Who sixtieth anniversary, one of the best interviews I did that day was with Anna Foster on Radio Newcastle. She’d been very interested, engaged and fun, so I decided to try dropping her a note to see if she’d fancy a two-way with me to promote the Our Friends piece. Fortunately she did and I went on her show, down-the-line from one of our studios in Norwich of course, on Thursday lunchtime to have a chat about thepiece.
 
I enjoyed it, although I’m not massively pleased with how I came across. As too often when I do something live rather than as a carefully-constructed, built package, I spoke too fast, gabbled too much and repeated myself – very much like a bad Just a Minute contestant. You really would think I’d be better at this sort of thing by now…
 

 

But it was nice to go on, and intriguing to hear how bad they felt Daniel Craig’s accent was! Obviously I’m not in any position to be able to judge, but I’d never seen much criticism of the accents in the series before. I have, though, spotted a few more comments along those lines on social media since then – but also some saying how good they thought they were, too. So who knows…?
 
Anyway, it was good to be able to celebrate one of my favourite television dramas ever made, and a good start to the year writing-wise.