In the first of a series rewatching and reconsidering our favourite boxsets, we revisit the epic drama charting the demise of old Labour
Revisiting anything 15 years after you fell in love with it, having not been reacquainted with it since, is not something to be taken lightly. So much time has passed, so much has changed, that all that remains is your sketchy memory of it. Which meant I returned to Our Friends in the North with a certain amount of trepidation. Would the intervening time have been kind to it? Would the radical shift in television's terrain have robbed it of its magic? Would the extra years of experience change my reading of the whole affair?
The opening three episodes – there are nine, all set in a specific year beginning in 1964 and ending in 1995 – quelled any reservations. This was the Our Friends I remembered. The naturalistic, witty and incisive dialogue; the unobtrusive yet elegant camera work; the facility between the actors; the effortless blending of the social, personal and political. A series that charted the demise of the old Labour movement without sentimentality, but with an underlying rage at the times.
The drama follows the fortunes of four characters – Geordie (Daniel Craig), Nicky (Christopher Eccleston), Mary (Gina McKee), Tosker (Mark Strong) – through the decades, taking in infidelity, corruption, homelessness, politics, family and just about every kind of societal trend in its three-decade span. It is compelling without having a central narrative drive. There's no murder to be solved; no overarching mystery to be revealed. Instead it relies on great acting from the quartet of actors at its heart, a superb supporting cast (including Peter Vaughan, Malcolm McDowell and Alun Armstrong) and Peter Flannery's beautifully crafted script to propel the viewer from year to year.
This reaches its zenith in 1984, an episode that distils Flannery's vision into one flawless piece of television. Its evocation of England in the grip of the miner's strike is pitch perfect, the issues handled with sensitivity and without simplification, and the characters' interaction with the events wholly relevant. But for all its greatness, that episode is the beginning of the series' decline. The acting remains as sustained as ever before, but there is a lingering sense that Our Friends has run out of steam.
Flannery himself described the programme as a 'very, very posh soap opera' but the final four episodes feel too often like run-of-the-mill soap opera. Characters do things that seem to serve the plot, rather than their own lives. When Nicky, now a famous photographer, signs copies of his monograph to a long crowd of people in Waterstone's, and bags off with a young woman in thrall to his celebrity, it jars with the more exacting realism of what's gone before. There are also moments that clang bells rather than suggest what is coming – Tosker's new wife, in full 80s pomp, imploring him to put all of their savings "into stocks and shares" is a particularly wretched example – and plot lines become muddled and under-developed, particularly the clumsy Alzheimer's story, which, though affecting in places, feels like it belongs in another drama altogether.
Don't get me wrong, there is much to enjoy in those later episodes, but there is also a sense of what might have been. I couldn't help but think that politically there were punches pulled. The Falklands is not mentioned, ditto the poll tax riots, Thatcher's resignation and the first Gulf war. Whether the producers felt under political pressure to avoid another Tumbledown-style controversy is a moot point; it does not excuse a seeming lack of true engagement in the years that follow the miner's strike. The next generation are poorly sketched, one-note generalisations leaving the original friends under written as adults and parents. They all seem curiously unchanged, despite what has gone on around them.
Ultimately, however, the memory of Our Friends ... has not diminished. Its ambition, scope and sheer quality shine through even the weaker episodes; and with UK drama experiencing a debatable crisis of confidence, it's important to remember that we can do this kind of thing incredibly well. For all its flaws, Our Friends remains a touchstone for the possibility of serious, involving television – and should be an inspiration for controllers of drama whichever network they work for.