An award-winning television series, which launched the careers of Daniel Craig and Christopher Eccleston is being adapted into a radio drama for BBC Radio 4.
Our Friends in the North was broadcast on BBC Two in 1996, focusing on 4 friends and their lives between 1964 and 1995. The radio adaptation will end with a new 10th episode, to bring the series into modern times.
The original cast also included Gina McKee and Mark Strong.
Playwright and screenwriter Peter Flannery has rewritten his series, with the additional episode penned by Manchester-born writer, Adam Usden.
“The show was defiantly, wonderfully unsentimental. One of the things I loved was that even when people failed in the immediate moment, very often we saw how flashes of kindness, warmth and moral courage redeem them in surprising ways, sometimes decades later, even if the people never realised the impact their actions had on others,” said Usden, who’s set the new episode in Newcastle in 2020.
“Legacy hangs over everything and setting a story 25 years after the show ended gives me a real chance to explore that.”
Four new actors will join Radio 4’s revival – James Baxter (Alma’s Not Normal), Norah Lopez Holden, Philip Correia and Luke MacGregor (The Archers).
“It is exciting to welcome back such an iconic drama and further still to offer a new instalment. With its themes illuminating the continuing ‘North-South divide’ today, this powerful and well-loved saga is told by a committed and talented team, many from the North of England themselves, whose passion for the story is self-evident. It will be warmly welcomed by fans and a chance for discovery by a new audience too,” added Alison Hindell, Radio 4 Commissioning Editor for Drama and Fiction.
The drama tackled corporate, political and police corruption in the 1960s, the rise and fall of the Soho porn empires in the 1970s, the nouveau riche and the Miners’ Strike of the 1980s plus the rise of New Labour in the 1990s.
Our Friends in the North begins Thursday 17 March, 2.15pm on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
