'Our Friends In The North' - Eccleston Joins Panel

2009-12 BFI is offering Radical Television Drama screenings and discussions. In the programme on Friday, 11th December, 18:20 is one episode of 'Our Friends In The North', and for the discussion part, beside Peter Flannery, producers Michael Wearing and Charles Pattinson, Christopher Eccleston will also join the panel.

BFI Southbank:

Loyalties to family, community and political principles are tested to breaking point in this episode of Peter Flannery's seminal series. As the miners' strike takes hold, police brutality is used to hold the line and contain 'the enemy within'. Combining the personal with the political, this caught the mood for a whole generation.

Episode 7: 1984

We are delighted to announce that cast member Christopher Eccleston will join the panel discussion after this screening.

Book the ticket here.

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Additionally -- Excerpt from 'Sight and Sound':

'Our Friends in the North' will be one of the major television programmes of this or any other year. Its ambition alone is invigorating, as is its lack of concession to international market forces; the script is one of the most passionately engaging since Bleasdale's 'Boys from the Blackstuff' or 'GBH'. According to writer Peter Flannery, the joke was that the BBC hierarchy worried it had commissioned a drama about post-war British housing policy; that lasted until a Controller of BBC2 was heard that "no one is interested in the Labour party anymore" (about as inaccurate a prediction as was possible). Good sense prevailed, and Flannery's story of four Geordie friends and the political forces shaping their lives over a 30-year span, was recognised as the nearest thing we're likely to get to a British 'Heimat'.

'Our Friends…' is a study of social responsibility, including a vividly dramatised debate about the increasingly dirty manipulation of politics by early spin-doctors and PR men, and "the great moral issue facing British politics – corruption." It centres on some particularly colourful cases […] played out against a background of entrenched complacency; Flannery's work is a culmination of that tradition of British engaged – some might say enraged – realism that began with 'Cathy Come Home' (and includes his own 'Blind Justice'). The character of Nicky Hutchinson is used to test the old certainties of political social realism, to question whether the forms of commitment familiar from television drama are still workable as the legacy of the 60s and 70s passes away. Which makes 'Our Friend' very contemporary. And the great strength of the television serial – the ability to present the passing of time in a long-form narrative – has never been better used: every episode is set in a different election year, from 1964 to the present... How the cultural can infect the personal is also brilliantly realised.

--Ray Cathode, 'Sight and Sound', February 1996--

Thanks to Hedgehog.

Brief report by Jen:

"First of all they showed the episode and then had a Guardian journalist speak to the panel about the making of it, the controversies surrounding it and why Christopher was attracted to it in the first place. Christopher had just finished 'Lennon Naked' for BBC4. Wearing jeans, black jogging top and his black Timberland boots, with a shaven head he looked threatening to the audience, but lightened up after a few minutes, taking two plastic cups of a unknown red wine. There was time for three questions in the following discussion.

In 1995 Christopher had just finished 'Shallow Grave', and it was Danny Boyle who said at the time to him there were a lot of good scripts floating about, I think you ought to look at them, one of which was 'Our Friends In The North' - which Christopher's agent at the time was getting her hands on. The one thing that attracted Christopher to the series was when his character's father (played by Peter Vaughan) was attacked by the Rottweiler, it reminded him so much of his parent's generation living in the same estate all their lives and suddenly finding the world changing at an alarming rate. Made him realise that society was changing too.

Regarding drama production - it's not so much about quantity, Christopher suggested, but quality. He thought once he went to America ("to make some shite movies" in his own words) he'd come back to real drama because that's what he was brought up in his generation (those who are aged 40 or over, including me) with single stand outs such as 'Play For Today' and 'Abigail's Party' et al.

Regarding the historic events in this episode of the series, in reality the power of editing distorted actual truth. You may remember the controversy surrounding the furore about 'Queensgate', and how the BBC were forced to apologise over how the Queen 'appeared' to be storming out of a photoshoot with Annie Lebowitz? The same matter happened with the Miner's Strike and the battle of Orgreave Colliery. The BBC edited images so it 'appeared' that the miners were in the wrong, and that they had caused trouble, and that the police had stormed in. Fact was that it made it cheap to sell the story to the tabloids, and that nearly twenty five years on the BBC had to retract it.

They cited BBC2 controller at the time, Michael Jackson (no, not that one or the beer expert either), to take the gamble of not only making 'Our Friends...' but 'This Life' too. Both were high quality dramas way ahead of what BBC1 were putting out. Michael Grade just said 'no' at the time, "it wouldn't work", and that he much rather put on Noel Edmonds on a Saturday night to attract a larger share of the audience. People aren't dumb, but just look at the state of television now, the same mediocrity is being churned out at an alarming rate.

Television writers have to clinically sanitise dramas to satisfy those in the organisation i.e. to play it safe. There was according to Peter Flannery a course and a questionnaire that they all had to fill out suggesting ways how to film. Mainly because of what happened after the Brand "and what's that other chap's name?" telephone calls. Example given was the mouse scenario which Christopher played on sarcastically. There's a scene with an actor and you need to capture an emotion so you put in a mouse into the shot. Do you a) film it, b) not film it or c) film it to see the reaction of the actor. There's no right or wrong answer until there's one answer, a basic Catch.22 situation is played out.

There was going to be a prequel called 'Our Friends In The South' and that Geordie Peacock was going to be stuck out in the jungle somewhere.
[The original play dealt with "the scandal of sanctions-busting by which British oil companies supplied the illegal white supremacist regime in Rhodesia." This abandoned strand actually provided the title for the series: "An internal memo from BP in South Africa cryptically spoke of looking after 'Our Friends In The North' - a coded reference to the rebel government of Ian Smith" // M. Eaton, "Our Friends In The North", BFI TV classics book]

Christopher said that the programme has to have an ending, while he thought continual dramas such as 'Lost', coming back season after season, a bit of waste of time; there must be a conclusion. He also criticised 'Spooks' for being unrealistic.

There will never be a drama serial quite like in the realms of 'Our Friends In The North' not because of the expense, but because of getting a commission for it. It's a scary thought that the BBC is now concentrating on what they call "returning dramas" i.e. soaps instead of producing good quality drama. Any wonder why Jimmy McGovern is not making any more of 'The Street' - it's simply because of this, and it made the panel angry that there are good writers out there who want to put on dramas for the modern age and can't.

This is tragic insomuch that the generation below me is going to be spoon fed on 'X-Factor', reality TV and soaps, and that the likes of 'Our Friends...' would never get commissioned by any of the main five channels let alone any of the satellite stations. It's criminal to think that no-one has the courage to and stand up for intelligent scripts and the like."

Continue to Hedgehog's report.