It’s regarded as one of the greatest British television dramas of all time, launching the early careers of its stars Daniel Craig, Christopher Eccleston, Gina McKee and Mark Strong.
But while it was set in the mid-60s to 90s, the storylines of politics, corruption and class prevalent in Our Friends in the North are just as relevant today, its writer has said as a new radio adaptation launched.
“Nothing has changed since then,” Peter Flannery said. “We have corrupt politicians, locally and nationally, we have a corrupt police force. We’re still chucking out houses for poor people to live in, which turn out to be deathtraps. Pornography has got worse, the attacks on women have got worse.”
Flannery, 70, wrote Our Friends in the North as a stage play when he was in his 20s and working as a writer-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. The TV adaptation – which cost £8m to make, half of BBC2’s drama serials budget for a year – was beset with legal problems because of similarities to real-life politicians and businesspeople. It was eventually broadcast on BBC2 in 1996, when Flannery was 44, and hailed as a landmark show that combined the personal and political.
The storyline follows four friends over three decades against a backdrop of political, corporate and police corruption, shoddy housing scandals, the 1970s porn empires, the 1980s miners’ strike and the rise of New Labour in the 1990s.
Flannery has called it a “posh soap opera”, not unlike the work of Shakespeare, where love, tragedy and politics combine to produce big storylines full of emotion.
“And that still works,” he said. “Young people falling in love, then falling out of love and betraying each other; parents growing old, the onset of dementia; the disintegration of communities in the north. All of that I could be writing about today.”
Born in Jarrow, south Tyneside, Flannery said he was inspired to write the play by his parents, who “were cynical about the political process in England much more than I was. The first thing they talked about was corruption.”
“Not long before that there had been a lot of corruption scandals centred in the north-east, around T Dan Smith [then leader of Newcastle city council],” he added. “So I rang Smith and said: ‘Look, I’m thinking about writing a play about corruption in British public life, and he said: ‘Well there’s a play here of Shakespearean proportions’.”
Once he began researching the subject, he says it was like “dropping a pebble into a pond, the ripples just went out”.
For Flannery, one of the clearest examples of continuity can found in the Metropolitan police. His show looked at the attempt to clean up the Met in 1970, “when a guy called Frank Williamson was brought in to head an outside inquiry for the very first time. It utterly failed. He wrote a very good report and put it on the desk of the home secretary, Reginald Maudling, and it was back on his desk within the hour without a single mark on it. That rings a few bells.
“So it’s no surprise to me to find pockets of corrupt detectives today, murdering women in London and dealing in pornography. Because nothing has changed.”
On Tuesday, a report by the policing inspectorate found the Met’s ability to tackle corruption was “fundamentally flawed”.
While this and other things remain woefully familiar, much has also changed in the north-east since Flannery penned the show, including the concept of a “red wall”.
“The north was pretty much solid Labour territory,” he said. “It was tribal. But that changed because New Labour blurred the distinction. It became all right to vote Tory because Blair turned Labour into a kind of progressive Tory party anyway, and then lied his way into a disastrous war, which he’s still defending.”
There are indeed lines that can be drawn from that period to recent developments, including the Brexit vote and a backlash against political elites. “The 60s were unusual because people did get charged and go to prison, like T Dan Smith, John Poulson and Andrew Cunningham. That hardly ever happens now,” Flannery said.
“People haven’t really paid a price. You tend not to get caught in this country, and you tend not to have to pay a hefty price if you do get caught, unless you’re poor. What will be outcome of all the Downing Street parties? Are you expecting mass imprisonment or fines? I’m not.”
The Radio 4 adaptation, which began on Thursday 17 March, includes a 10th episode, penned by writer Adam Usden, which takes the main characters’ stories up to the year 2020. Flannery has not seen or discussed the final episode with Usden.
“I think there might be two audiences,” he says. “A new one, which will find it very relevant, and an old one who will remember the characters they spent so much time with. I wish I had a pound for every time someone has said to me they felt like real people by the end.”
• This article was amended on 24 March 2022 to correct the series start date to Thursday 17 March.
