The real-life public figures drawn on here include Labour council leader T. Dan Smith, architect and freemason John Poulson, Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, Newcastle businessman Sir John Hall, and ex-Chief Constable Frank Williamson.

Our Friends in the North: Complete Series | WHSmith Our Friends in the North: Complete Series | WHSmith

Awards Archive February 2011" (PDF). Royal Television Society. February 2011 . Retrieved 2 September 2013. Television – Dennis Potter Award in 1997". British Academy of Film and Television Arts . Retrieved 2 September 2013. Television – Actor in 1997". British Academy of Film and Television Arts . Retrieved 2 September 2013. 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. [8]The first director approached to helm the production by Michael Wearing was Danny Boyle. [34] 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. [35] 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. [34] When Shallow Grave proved to be a critical success, Boyle was able to enter pre-production on Trainspotting. He withdrew from Our Friends in the North. [36] Sir Peter Hall was also briefly considered, but he too had other production commitments. [36] Lane, Harriet (17 December 2000). "From famine to feast..." The Observer. p.9 . Retrieved 2 September 2013. 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. [64] This would have told the story of the Jarrow March. [65] Although the BBC initially took up the project, it did not progress to script stage and was eventually abandoned. [64] [65]

BBC Radio 4 - Our Friends in the North BBC Radio 4 - Our Friends in the North

a b "Peter Flannery revives Our Friends in the North for Radio 4". BBC Media Centre. 24 February 2022 . Retrieved 24 February 2022. 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). [9] 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. [9] The original three-hour long theatre version of Our Friends in the North, directed by John Caird and featuring Jim Broadbent and Roger Allam among the cast, was produced by the RSC in 1982. It initially ran for a week at The Other Place in Stratford before touring to the city in which it was set, Newcastle upon Tyne, and then playing at The Pit, a studio theatre in the Barbican Centre in London. [10] Daniel Craig was auditioned late for the role of Geordie. At the audition he performed the Geordie accent very poorly but won the part, which came to be regarded as his breakthrough role. [7] [6] Mark Strong worked on the Geordie accent by studying episodes of the 1980s comedy series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, which featured lead characters from Newcastle. [40] 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. [40]

This, I should point out, is merely the skeleton on which the multi-stranded and densely plotted flesh of the series is built. Each of the four stories is littered with social, political and personal detail, and if Mary seems not to figure prominently in the above summary, it's because her tale is initially one of increasingly unhappy subjugation, from which she later emerges as perhaps the most forward-looking and level-headed of the four, though no less wrapped up in her own obsessions. That it never plays like a polemic is down in no small part to Flannery's willingness to explore the flaws, uncertainties, and even self-delusion of his characters and his refusal to place them in easily definable boxes. This is followed through in the impeccable handling (how often have we seen potentially fine TV drama scripts homogenised by off-the-peg casting and formulaic filmmaking?), with different time periods handled individually by directors Simon Cellan Jones and Pedr James (see the extras section for more on this), the shift between the filmmakers occurring without a hint of visual or dramatic discontinuity.

Our Friends in the North - Complete Series - 3-DVD Box Set Our Friends in the North - Complete Series - 3-DVD Box Set

a b "The Devil's Whore mixes fact with fiction". Shields Gazette. 14 November 2008 . Retrieved 2 September 2013. I wanted to do Our Friends in the South for the BBC, which would have been a kind of prequel to Our Friends in the North, but it was never taken up, so it remained an idea only, with no actual play. I wasn't born or raised in the north, and until recently didn't have any friends who lived there. As a young socialist growing up in the south, this sometimes felt like a credibility millstone, in part because this is where Margaret Thatcher's greed bomb exploded, tarring everyone born in the southern counties with the same wretched pinstripe or barrow-boy brush. It's also fair to say that the north has repeatedly born the brunt of regressive Tory legislation, being far enough from the capital and the common concept of 'Middle England' – whatever the hell that really is – to be of seemingly little concern to those passing the legislation. What the Left of the north always had, something that was too often in short supply down our way, was a strong sense of solidarity and communal unity, in part because of the damage done to those very communities by legislation they were instrumental in opposing. And even today, the song remains the same. Although I live in the southern region that has been calculated to take the biggest hammering from David Cameron's ideologically motivated spending cuts, * it's once again the North East and the Midlands that are set to come off worst, with Middlesborough predicted to suffer the heaviest blow.

Side guide

a b c "The top 50 TV dramas of all time: 2–10". The Guardian. 12 January 2010 . Retrieved 2 September 2013. 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. [11] 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. [12] 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. [13] Armstrong, Simon (27 August 2016). "Our Friends in the North: What made it so special?". BBC News . Retrieved 27 August 2016. Bringing the storyline up to date was daunting, said Usden. “It was a complete story. [Flannery] had landed the plane, and now I was being asked to take off again, and not crash it.