Number of Items in Your Basket
Basket Total
BFI Filmstore  >   Filmstore Sale 2012 >  BFI Film & TV Classics Guides  > Our Friends in the North: BFI TV Classics
Information
 Home
 Latest BFI Products
 Best Sellers
 Offers & Promotions
 BFI Member Discounts
 Visit the Filmstore
 Filmstore Events
 Certification
Products
Contact Us
Tel: 020 7815 135
Accepted Cards: Visa Mastercard Amex Maestro Delta Solo Electron
Our Friends in the North: BFI TV Classics

01-Dec-05
192 pages
Published/distributed by BFI Publishing
ISBN/EAN: 9781844570928
Paperback
Price: £6.00
<back
Our Friends in the North: BFI TV Classics 
Eaton, Michael
Our Friends in the North (1996) is the kind of epic drama that has ensured the BBC's peerless worldwide reputation for seriousness and excellence. In nine parts, it tells the life stories of four friends - Mary (Gina McKee), Nicky (Christopher Eccleston), Geordie (Daniel Craig) and Tosker (Mark Strong) - from adolescence to middle age. Their personal triumphs and crises unfold against the backdrop of massive social and political change in Britain - in particular the rise of Thatcherism and the dwindling of socialist ideals. Technically outstanding, Our Friends in the North is truly a 'state of the nation' drama but one which explores its large themes as well as more specific ones (domestic violence, corruption in the police and local government, iniquities in the criminal justice system) while developing its central characters with exceptional subtlety and finesse.

Michael Eaton traces the history of Our Friends in the North: its origins in Peter Flannery's 1982 play for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the long road to TV adaptation (thanks to the untiring support of Executive Producer Michael Wearing). Eaton, himself a screenwriter, has conducted lengthy interviews with Flannery, Wearing and others, and this book provides extensive insight into the often labyrinthine ways in which TV drama is commissioned and produced. He goes on to locate the series in the genealogy of quality television drama, assessing its considerable accomplishments as such; and he reflects on whether Our Friends in the North could ever be made today. Did the series bring an end to a Golden Age of British TV drama - and, if so, what have we lost in the process?
0