Comfort Classic: Our Friends in the North

COMFORT CLASSIC

Few TV dramas deserve the epithet “Shakespearean” or “Tolstoyan” more than Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North, which turns 25 this year.

The BBC Two series was epic in scale, using more than 160 actors and 3,000 extras to tell the story of postwar Britain, its people and its dirty politics. It is also the tale of four Newcastle friends, who grow up and grow old over three decades. And it is both moving and magnificent.

Frequently judged one of Britain’s best-ever dramas, Our Friends in the North opens in 1964 with Geordie (Daniel Craig) and Tosker (Mark Strong) starting a band and hoping old friend Nicky (Christopher Eccleston) will join.

Nicky, recently returned from the US, has a guitar case bearing folk singer Woody Guthrie’s legendary words “This machine kills fascists”, and is forsaking pop for politics. Mary (Gina McKee) is going out with Nicky, but Nicky is consumed by ideology, not lust, and Tosker see his opportunity…

Over the next three decades, the friends drift in and out of love, and contact. Geordie falls into destitution; Nicky, ever the idealist, is his own worst enemy; foolish Tosker belatedly finds some self-awareness; and Mary, the beating heart of the drama, rises to the top.

The final scene, accompanied by Oasis’s Don’t Look Back in Anger, is impossibly poignant: at its recollection now, I am welling up.

Away from the personal, Our Friends in the North deals with big issues. Corruption looms large throughout, in local Newcastle politics, Westminster and the police.

Ordinary people suffer, whether they are the tenants of substandard, localauthority housing built on bribes; or Geordie, the victim of corrupt police officers and a Soho sex baron (Malcolm McDowell); or the pickets savagely beaten during the 1984 miners’ strike.

Jarrow-born Flannery was writing from experience: he had witnessed the economic devastation wrought on the North East. Our Friends in the North is angry but never righteously so; it is

BBC