Our Friends in the North .......... revisiting the drama which spanned my growing up and much more

Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 2010

Now I always think it is a bit odd to watch a period you have lived through presented as drama, more so when many of the big events were played out as a backdrop to your own life.

And so it is with Our Friends in the North which was produced by the BBC in 1995 and charts the personal and political fortunes of four people from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.*

The drama spans thirty years from the summer of 1964 opening with the bright optimism of the 60s, moving on to the class conflicts of the 1970s and 80s and drawing in much more along the way.

I was just fourteen in 1964, still very much at school and just beginning to form my own ideas about politics, and what I really liked in music but with no thoughts about my own future.

Labour Election Poster, 1966

Two years later I had joined the Labour Party worked in the General Election and started at one of the big show comprehensives in south east London.

And the succeeding decades for me were spent in Manchester and briefly in the North East playing a very small walk on part in some of the big events featured in the drama and bringing up a family

I watched it at the time and have begun watching it again and it has the power to take me directly back to that time.

Of course all dramas will telescope events, gloss over some issues and may even get some things a tad wrong but I have never been one to dismiss them out of hand, so having watched two episodes I am hooked.

Newcastle-Upon-Tyne or more strictly Gateshead was where my father was born and just a little further south is Seaham Harbour and Sunderland where I spent some very happy times and at  Peterlee where I was briefly employed knocking wooden boxes together in the Tudor Crisp factory.

So it rather does have the lot.

And that is all I want to say at present.

Pictures; Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 2010, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and 1966 Labour election poster, courtesy of the Labour Party, https://shop.labour.org.uk/products/

*Our Friends in the North, BBC Television Production, 1995