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.
The series follows four friends from the north-east of England between 1964 and 1995. There’s idealistic Nicky, who spends his life between leftwing groups before reaching middle-aged disillusionment. Tosker, who goes from wannabe pop star to archetypical 80s upstart. Geordie, who glows brightly in the seedy world of 1960s Soho, before stints in prison and on the streets. And pragmatic Mary, who, after years of being mistreated by the men in her life, rises through the ranks of the Labour party machinery and into parliament.
The most central character outside the friends is Austin Donohue, the former Labour radical who, in the first episode, is leader of Newcastle council. Based closely on the disgraced former Labour politician T Dan Smith and his ambition to turn Newcastle into the “Brasília of the North”, Donohue soon quits frontline politics for a PR agency that represents a dodgy developer peddling “systems-built” apartment blocks. The buildings are shoddily made and blighted by damp, and the scheme that Donohue constructs to sell them to councils is based on kickbacks and bribes. But Donohue is an ambiguous figure. He’s driven as much by a messianic fervour as a lust for power. As he later says when confronted about the poorly built flats constructed in his name: “At least I tried, Nicky!”
Other public figures get off no less lightly. In the wake of contemporary scandals that have rocked institutions such as the Metropolitan police, the show’s portrayal of a British establishment riddled with corruption and greed more than resonates: it feels prophetic. Geordie, who flees the north-east for London after getting a local girl pregnant, is soon caught up with menacing Soho porn impresario Benny Barratt, whose empire of strip clubs, sex shops and brothels is maintained by a network of bent coppers that stretches all the way to the top of the force. (A storyline closely follows the Met’s Obscene Publications division, known, appropriately, as “the Dirty Squad”.)
If there’s anything like a winner in all of this, it’s the Thatcherite everyman Tosker, who rises from the factory floor to become a minor clubland kingpin. But while the show’s vision of British history is a pessimistic one, it’s not one without hope. The final episode was aired in January 1996, just a year before Labour’s landslide election victory following 18 years of Conservative government – and playing as the show’s final episode fades out is Don’t Look Back in Anger, an anthem from what would become the defining Cool Britannia band. But any residual pro-New Labourism this might suggest is undercut by the earlier scene in which Mary’s son, Anthony, chides his mother for her political compromises. “If you and your New Labour party sound any more like the Tories,” he tells her, “they’ll sue you for plagiarism.” Any observer of Keir Starmer’s Labour party will recognise such compromises well.
These echoes prove Our Friends in the North to be no mere period piece. None of the issues the show mines so brilliantly – from inequality, deindustrialisation and the parlous state of Britain’s housing to homelessness and the corruption of our public officials – have gone away. If anything, they’ve only grown more acute. The north of England, when it is thought of at all, is flattened and mythologised. This fabled land of the “red wall” is so often seen as a monolithic bloc of disgruntled proles, not the complex region full of people who have seen decades of managed decline, often from both main political parties. Revisiting Our Friends in the North, with its nuanced and beautifully drawn vision of the region and its people, will not solve this in itself. But it’s a good start.
John Merrick is a writer and editor. He is working on his first book, on the experience of class in contemporary Britain
