There’s a scene in the final episode of Our Friends in the North that poignantly captures what, for me, the show is all about – the endless tension that so many feel between political hope and frustration, youthful romanticism and resigned pragmatism. Nicky, one of the group of four friends we follow from youth to middle age, takes his jaded father, Felix, to a Yorkshire village that he stopped at on the Jarrow march about 60 years earlier. There, a woman who, as a young girl, saw those 200 men on their way to London in protest at the high unemployment that was crippling their shipbuilding town, remembers the words of her own late father. “It made you realise,” she recalls him saying, “that you had a choice in life. You could be downtrodden, or you could stand up for yourself.”
First broadcast in 1996, the series has now returned with a remake on BBC Radio 4, which brings the show’s sweeping narrative to the present day – there will be a new 10th episode to be set in the year 2020, 25 years after the setting of the original series finale. On revisiting this TV classic today, what’s still striking is its ambition. Never didactic, the show is a rich portrait of four, intersecting working-class lives that charts the long arc of British politics, both locally and nationally, over 30 pivotal years. If it has filmic siblings then they are less the usual prestige TV fare of The Wire or The Sopranos than Edgar Reitz’s Brechtian epic of German history, Heimat, or Ken Loach’s 1975 BBC series about Britain in the early 20th century, Days of Hope. Equally striking is its stridently political tone and its deeply felt portrayal of a region that is so often misunderstood.
