Our Friends in The North - Background

Background

Our Friends in the North was originally written by the playwright Peter Flannery for the theatre, while he was a resident playwright for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982. The play was produced by the RSC, and in its original form went up only to the 1979 general election and the coming to power of the new Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher. 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. These scenes were dropped from the televised version.

Flannery was heavily influenced not only by his own political viewpoints and life experiences, but by the real-life history of his home city of Newcastle during the 1960s and 1970s. Characters such as Austin Donohue and John Edwards were directly based on the real-life scandals of T. Dan Smith and John Poulson, who built cheap high-rise housing projects in Newcastle that they knew to be of low quality. Flannery went to visit Smith and explained that he was going to write a play based on the events of the scandal, to which Smith apparently replied, "There is a play here of Shakespearean proportions."

The stage version of the story was seen by BBC television drama producer Michael Wearing, who was immediately keen on producing a television adaptation. Wearing was based at the BBC English Regions Drama Department at BBC Birmingham, which had a specific remit for making "regional drama", and had established his reputation by producing Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff in 1982. Flannery was also keen on writing a television version, but during the 1980s the pair were frustrated in their attempts to bring the story to the screen, as various BBC executives failed to green light the project, which twice stalled in preproduction.

By 1989, however, Wearing had been recalled to the central BBC drama department in London, where he was made Head of Serials. This new seniority eventually allowed him to further the cause of Our Friends in the North, and Flannery also wrote to the BBC's then Managing Director of Television, Will Wyatt, "accusing him of cowardice for not approving it." The BBC were concerned not only with the budget and resources that would be required to produce the serial, but also with potential legal issues, due to the basing of so much of the background story on real-life events and people such as Smith and Poulson and former Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, upon whom another character, Claud Seabrook, was based. According to The Observer newspaper, one senior BBC lawyer, Glen Del Medico, even threatened to resign if the production was made, while others tried to persuade Flannery to reset the piece "in a fictional country called Albion rather than Britain."

However, the legal situation was eased after the deaths of Smith and Poulson in 1993, and Wearing, Flannery and their chosen producer for the serial, Charles Pattinson, were able to persuade the then Controller of BBC Two, Michael Jackson, to commission the piece. The long delay in production did, however, have the advantageous side effect of allowing Flannery to extend the story, and instead of ending in 1979 it now carried on into the 1990s, allowing him to cover other politically charged events such as the miners' strike of 1984.

The series did encounter further legal problems when some references to the fictional businessman Alan Roe were removed because of a perceived similarity to Sir John Hall, a Newcastle businessman who had a number of factors in common. The drama had originally shown Roe as taking advantage of tax breaks to build a large shopping centre.

The stage play was revived by Northern Stage in 2007 with 14 cast members playing 40 characters.