Christopher Eccleston and writer Peter Flannery: how we made Our Friends in the North
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Version 0 of 1. Christopher Eccleston, actor I was filming Shallow Grave, and Danny Boyle mentioned that he’d heard good things about this TV project called Our Friends in the North, which he was originally going to direct. I got hold of the script and right from the off, I knew I had to be in it. It’s about four friends from Newcastle, telling their story from 1964 to the mid-90s, what was then the present day. At first they offered me the part of Geordie Peacock, the role that eventually went to Daniel Craig. But I had my eye on this terrific character Nicky Hutchinson – a young, educated lad from a working-class background who starts out a firebrand but is ground down by political corruption. I loved the politics of the series, the way it connected the story of postwar Britain – Harold Wilson through to Thatcher and beyond – to individual lives. Plus I couldn’t have competed with Daniel; he brought such sexiness and charisma to Geordie. That’s not really my department. Normally you only get to play a character from the age of 19 to 60 at drama school. I was in my early 30s at the time, so it involved plenty of terrible wigs, and the accent was a challenge. I found a non-actor who recorded all my dialogue, so that I could keep working on it. In the end I was told it was closer to Sunderland than Newcastle. But I was happy with that. And it was a great opportunity to learn: I wasn’t long out of training, and here I was, surrounded by all these amazing actors: Alun Armstrong, David Bradley, Gina McKee, Peter Vaughan, who played my father. It was hard. It took nine months to film and one of the directors left a few months after we started shooting in 1995. The very first episode had to be rewritten and reshot (which actually spared the audience hearing my singing). And it was an intense set: things were tense with Peter Vaughan, working through our difficult father-son relationship. Mark Strong and I didn’t get on in real life, just as our characters Nicky and Tosker didn’t get on. We were well cast in that respect – that’s as much as I’ll say. I’m suspicious of the label it often gets as the best drama ever; things have to be looked at forensically. There were many flaws in Our Friends in the North – those wigs, the lack of budget, the internal politics – but I think they were flaws because it was so ambitious. It came from a particular era of television: writer-led, issue-led. I genuinely don’t think anyone would have the balls to make it now. Peter Flannery, writer I’m used to TV projects taking a long time, but Our Friends in the North was in another league. I’d written the play the series was based on for the Royal Shakespeare Company while I was writer-in-residence there in the early 80s. A BBC producer, Michael Wearing, wanted to turn it into a four-part TV series. But by the time I had written it, everyone had moved on: the new BBC1 people wanted what became EastEnders and couldn’t see room for both. The lawyers were anxious because of similarities to people who were still alive. It couldn’t find a home. But Michael kept plugging away, asked me to expand and update, and in the early 90s we tried again with BBC2, this time as a nine-part series going from the 60s onwards through to 1995, what was then the future. I remember pitching it to BBC executive Alan Yentob as a drama about postwar social housing, probably because I’d spent the day writing one of those scenes. He looked alarmed. Two days later, I’d have said it was all about sex and Soho. It got through eventually. The drama serial is one of Britain’s great cultural inventions – it’s like a novel, you have a huge canvas. My original play ended with Thatcher’s victory in 1979 and felt like it was about the decline of socialism. By the time the TV version came to life, telling the story of characters and a city over three decades, it was about so much more. You can see the rhymes and the echoes: Thatcherism and post-Thatcherism, being on the cusp of another Labour government in the late 90s. You see history repeating. The reception was thrilling. It got a big audience, which we weren’t expecting. Some of the critics said it would bore people, but they were wrong. You can tell any story you want to if the characters are interesting. The personal and the political are connected; it’s all one world. There’ll never be another Our Friends, but I am working on a new project that tries to make sense of our expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan from the 1970s onwards, a similar form, following a group of people through the decades. I hope it won’t take so long to make. I’ll be in my 80s if it does. |