Our Friends in The North - Production and Broadcast

Production and Broadcast

The epic scale of the production required Jackson to devote a budget of £8 million to the serial – half of his serials budget for the entire year. The speaking cast numbered 160, the production employed over 3000 extras and filming lasted for a year, from the autumn of 1994 to the autumn of 1995. Although he had originally intended to produce the serial himself in the 1980s, Wearing was now Executive Producer, with Charles Pattinson producing.

Of the actors playing the four main roles, only Eccleston was well-known prior to featuring in the serial, having starred in the ITV drama series Cracker and the film Shallow Grave. He had initially been seen by the production team as being a good candidate to play Geordie, but had been very keen to play Nicky instead, eventually winning that role. He had become aware of the serial after being told about the scripts by the director of Shallow Grave, Danny Boyle, who had been approached by Michael Wearing to direct all nine episodes. Boyle was initially keen, but wanted to see how Shallow Grave fared first. When the film proved to be a success Boyle decided to concentrate on his film career instead.

Following Boyle's turning down of directing duties, Pattinson and Wearing decided to assign different directors to each 'era' of the project, with Stuart Urban assigned the first five episodes and Simon Cellan Jones the final four. However, after completing the first two episodes and some of the shooting for the third, Urban left the project after disagreements with the production team – Christopher Eccleston's viewpoint is that Urban was apparently "only interested in painting pretty pictures." Director Pedr James was hired to shoot the remainder of what were to have been Urban's episodes, with all three directors being credited on the third instalment.

However, there were to be further problems with the already completed opening instalment, 1964, again partially due to the dissatisfaction of the production team with Urban's direction. After viewing the completed material for the episode, Wearing and Pattinson took the expensive decision to entirely reshoot it, under James's direction, in between the sixth (1979) and seventh (1984) episodes. However, it was not a simple reshooting of existing scenes – Flannery took the opportunity to completely rewrite the opening episode, in some cases changing the initial storylines of the characters quite dramatically, such as no longer having Mary already married to Tosker when the serial begins. This was mainly done because the initial episode had been the one most faithful to the original text of the stage play, and Flannery felt that the storyline needed opening out for television, as well as simply having changed his mind about various ideas since he had written the original play.

Aside from the remount of the first episode, the serial was shot on an episode-by-episode basis, with the exception of the scenes involving the character of Benny Barrett, played by Malcolm McDowell across various episodes from 1966 to 1979. These were all shot together in one block, as McDowell was not resident in the UK, living then in the United States, and for budgetary reasons the production team did not want to keep him in the country for any longer than was necessary. This was considered more than worthwhile, however, for the prestige of being able to use an actor such as McDowell, predominantly a film actor who rarely did television work.

Much use was made throughout the production of contemporaneous popular music to evoke the feel of the year in which each episode was set. This led to a particular piece of synchronicity in the final episode, 1995, which Cellan Jones had decided to close with the song Don't Look Back in Anger by Oasis, which while the serial was in production was only another track from their (What's the Story) Morning Glory? album. However, during transmission of Our Friends in the North it was released as a single, and to Cellan Jones's delight it was at the top of the UK Singles Chart the week of the final episode's transmission.

Our Friends in the North was broadcast in nine episodes on BBC Two at 9pm on Monday nights, from 15 January to 11 March 1996. Unusually for a drama series, the running times of the episodes were inconsistent – although nominally seventy minutes each, they in fact varied from 63 minutes, 49 seconds (1966) to 74 minutes 40 seconds (1987). The total running time of the serial is ten hours, twenty-three minutes.

Following its great success, Our Friends in the North was given a repeat broadcast in the summer of 1997 on BBC2, on Saturday nights. It was also released on VHS across two double-video packs (1964 – 1974 and 1979 – 1995). In 2002, BMG Video released the complete series on DVD in a four-disc set, which along with the original episodes contained several extra features. These were a retrospective discussion of the series by Wearing, Pattinson, Flannery, James and Cellan Jones; specially shot interviews with Eccleston and McKee, and a detailed text synopsis of the plot of the original opening episode. In the 2000s, the serial has also been screened by the digital television station UKTV Drama. BBC Four broadcast a repeat screening in February 2006.

After being out of print for a few years, the DVD was re-released in September 2010, this time as a three-disc set with a 20-page "Viewers' Notes" booklet written by Marcus Hearn. For an unknown reason, most of the song "Don't Look Back In Anger" by Oasis is removed at the end of the final episode, fading out early and the credits instead rolling in silence.

Both Eccleston and Craig would later go on to achieve notable high "cult" status when they took over the respective high-profile roles of the Doctor in Doctor Who and James Bond. Mark Strong has become known for playing villains in Hollywood movies and Gina McKee is well known to British television audiences.