#Our Friends in the North

[beautywithin16]

Christopher Eccleston

Our Friends in the North: 1966

[sirbogarde]

Started watching Our Friends in the North. Featuring 3 familiar faces in their first big role. Trying to take them seriously despite the hair and accents

[not-sure-who-i-am-rn]

Rip George Eliot, you would have loved Our Friends in the North

[hamoimproviso]

A few years have passed since I watched this when it aired. Still hugely bold, intelligent, political, important. Would have been good to see an update at some point over the years from the original writer. He married social commentary with humanity in a really thoughtful way. Geordie intervening on behalf of the boy who cannot get time, attention or love from his father, seeking to mend a path that might end where his had, in loneliness, homelessness, social isolation. The walk across the bridge to Don't Look Back In Anger is one of the best closing scenes in TV. Hugely moving. Kudos to the cast who captured these characters from their teens into late middle age. A landmark series, worthy of the recent revival on BBC4. Catch it on iPlayer or Britbox while you can.

[izzy-b-hands]

THEY ENDED IT WITH GOOD BYE YELLOW BRICK ROAD AFTER THEY ALL GOT REUNITED ARE U FUCKIN KIDDING ME

[mervynbunter]

And that speaks to the incredibly fortunate timing enjoyed by Our Friends in the North, a production that started life as a stage play in 1982 then went through various attempts at TV adaptation before finally reaching the screen at exactly the right moment for a bittersweet retrospective on the Labour movement in Britain. When people wanted the nostalgia because the real thing was about to happen.

It’s now 28 years since that original broadcast, which is — gallingly — nearly as long an interval as the one covered by the show itself, which dramatises 31 years in its characters’ lives: idealistic Nicky (Christopher Ecclestone), pragmatic Mary (Gina McKee), ambitious Tosker (Mark Strong) and damaged Geordie (Daniel Craig). It’s Nicky and his father Felix (Peter Vaughan) who act out the core of the political dispute.

Felix is the old Labour movement, a Jarrow marcher who’s never recovered from the sense of being betrayed by the Labour party. Nicky is the fractious next generation, fixing his utopianism to different models which all fail him: first he commits to politics but his hopes end up strangled by corruption, then he joins a hilariously posh and ineffectual anarchist cell, then he comes back to mainstream Labour as a kind of this-is-who-Jeremy-Corbyn-wishes-he-was parliamentary candidate (he loses as a result of a Conservative smear campaign, which I probably found more outrageous on first watch, before I’d experienced the real Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition).

So the brittle father-son relationship is an allegory for the sundering of labour politics from politics-politics. But it’s also a human relationship, defined in small moments of failure. I blinked back a tear in episode one when Felix — desperate for his son to go back to university rather than take a lobbying job — tries to push some cash on Nicky, even though the two have been fighting. Nicky can’t accept it, because he’s committed to changing the world through politics, so the two end up feeling rejected and misunderstood by each other thanks to a poorly articulated act of love and generosity: it’s a quiet scene that tells the story of a lifetime of grievances.

Then I really did cry in the final episode, set in 1995, when Felix has advanced dementia: Nicky tries to berate his father into remembering Jarrow, but it’s much too late. Felix can’t even feed himself. The connection Nicky longs for (but incessantly sabotages) is missed again, and he ends up futilely angry with an incapable old man. My daughter (17, so three years older than I was at first broadcast) watched some of the series with me and declared it “sad”, which it is: it’s a series about the fact that aging is a succession of losses. Lost loves, lost ideals, lost hopes.

Our Blimps in the North

[beautywithin16]

Christopher Eccleston 

Our Friends in the North: 1964

[sirbogarde]

Daniel Craig's character in Our Friends in the North is so funny bc he runs away from his abusive alcoholic dad to London and becomes a barista and then losses his job and then suddenly starts working for super rich and well connected dirty magazine seller Malcolm McDowell (who imports his stock from Denmark of course). And I'm only 3 episodes in.

[craigified]

‼️

It has come to my attention from my long-haired Benoit Blanc post that some of you have been missing out on some stuff & I must rectify this immediately

Dream House (2011)

Various public appearances in 2023 and 2024 (Sept, Nov 23’ and Jan, Mar 24’).

Casino Royale screen test (2005?)

The Invasion (2007)

And probably more; this is just off the top of my head at 2am sooo yk probably missing stuff.

[inky125]

Clover deserves uppies!

[faaun]

what draws you back to your country what draws you back to your land when i was a kid i told myself if i ever left iran i'd never go back 2 years into living in the UK i started looking at news on iran again 10 years in and i visited it for the first time again and today i heard an iranian mother talk in farsi to her child on the train to london the way my mother used to and i wanted to cry i wanted to ask her whether they're still cutting the mountaintops whether the lakes are still drying today i showed the person i was with pictures of waterfalls and palaces and forests and snow-white north something odd pulls me back with increasing force i can't ignore it ever again

[oifaaa]

Had my first ever cup of coffee yesterday and ngl that shit made me so damn sleepy what do you mean people use that to wake themselves up all I wanted to do was take a nap in the middle of that cafe

[kavehater]

I support girls but NAH THIS IS REACHING “if you look carefully LIKE REALLY CAREFULLY 🤓☝️”

[talesofsorrowandofruin]

PERIOD DRAMA APPRECIATION WEEK 2024

Day 2: Favourite Character(s):

Yi Bang-won, My Country: The New Age

Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey

Thomas Barrow, Downton Abbey

Esther Summerson, Bleak House

Molly Gibson, Wives and Daughters

Margaret Hale and John Thornton, North and South

Ulanara Ruyi, Legend of Ruyi

John Harmon and Bella Wilfer, Our Mutual Friend

[beautywithin16]

Christopher Eccleston 

Our Friends in the North: 1987

[sirbogarde]

finished Our Friends in the North. i guess they went for statistical realism by not having all 4 of them end up super happy. but like bruh not really a smiles and sunshine finale! It was, much like the north of england, very depressing.