page_title: Our Friends in the North
section_title: Stage play
hierarchical_section_title: Our Friends in the North / Background / Stage play
caption_attribution_description: English: this was taken from a footbridge at the southern end of Northumberland Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, it shows the street before it was pedestrianised. It shows 4 buses, one a Gateshead Leyland PD3 with MCW Orion bodywork in green and white, the other 3 are Newcastle Leyland Atlanteans in yellow and cream. This is on a Saturday in 1969
context_page_description: Our Friends in the North is a British television drama serial produced by the BBC. It was originally broadcast in nine episodes on BBC2 in early 1996. Written by Peter Flannery, it tells the story of four friends from the city of Newcastle upon Tyne in North East England over a period of 31 years, from 1964 to 1995. The story makes reference to certain political and social events which occurred during the era portrayed, some specific to Newcastle and others which affected Britain as a whole. These include general elections, police and local government corruption, the UK miners' strike, and the Great Storm of 1987.
  The serial is commonly regarded as one of the most successful BBC television dramas of the 1990s, described by The Daily Telegraph as "a production where all ... worked to serve a writer's vision. We are not likely to look upon its like again". It has been named by the British Film Institute as one of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century, by The Guardian newspaper as the third greatest television drama of all time and by the Radio Times magazine as one of the 40 greatest television programmes.
context_section_description: Our Friends in the North was originally written by the playwright Peter Flannery for the theatre, while he was a writer in residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). The idea came to Flannery while he was watching the rehearsals for the company's production of Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1980; the scale of the plays inspired him to come up with his own historical epic. The original three-hour long theatre version of Our Friends in the North, directed by John Caird and featuring Jim Broadbent and Roger Allam among the cast, was produced by the RSC in 1982. It initially ran for a week at The Other Place in Stratford before touring to the city in which it was set, Newcastle upon Tyne, and then playing at The Pit, a studio theatre in the Barbican Centre in London. In its original form, the story 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. This plot strand was dropped from the televised version, although the title Our Friends in the North, a reference to how staff at BP in South Africa referred to the Rhodesian government of Ian Smith, remained.
  Flannery was heavily influenced not only by his own political viewpoints and life experiences, but also by the actual 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. Flannery contacted Smith and explained that he was going to write a play based on the events of the scandal, to which Smith replied, "There is a play here of Shakespearean proportions."
caption: Northumberland Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, pictured in 1969, before it was pedestrianised. Life in Newcastle in the 1960s was a major influence on Peter Flannery's writing of Our Friends in the North.
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