Here’s a suggestion for how Keir Starmer might use this final weekend of the summer recess before politics resumes in earnest on Monday. He should settle into his favourite spot on the sofa and dive into a TV masterpiece that could not be more topical – one produced for the moment when a Tory government is dying and a new, Labour one is waiting to be born.
It sets out with brilliant clarity the range of problems that awaits the Labour leader should he reach Downing Street – housing, policing, poverty, crime, inequality – and grapples with the eternal dilemma of the left: is change best secured through radicalism, inspirational and impatient, or pragmatism, cautious and gradual? All that in nine gripping episodes.
Timely though it is, the series is not new. Nor will you find it by searching the documentary or current affairs categories, even though it’s hard to think of a TV programme that sheds more light on British politics or the country’s recent history. Instead, it is a drama first aired nearly three decades ago, one whose force and relevance have, if anything, only grown stronger.
I’m talking about Our Friends in the North by Peter Flannery, which debuted on BBC Two in 1996 and which I watched, and marvelled at, all over again this summer. It’s an epic tale told across three decades, following four characters born and raised on Tyneside – Nicky, Mary, Geordie and Tosker, impeccably played by Christopher Eccleston, Gina McKee, Daniel Craig and Mark Strong – from early adulthood in 1964 through to middle age in 1995. We follow their lives and their loves, their mistakes, heartbreaks and disappointments, as they try to shape, and are shaped by, the events of the age.
The fifth character is the Labour party. It rules Newcastle, determining the homes the four will live in, or eventually abandon, and turns and twists through their stories, pitting father against son, husband against wife. Two of the four, at different points, will either seek or win office wearing a red rosette.
One reason the show lives on – so that people who haven’t seen it since the mid-1990s still talk about the plight of the quartet as if discussing their own friends – is that the characters are not political ciphers, there solely to represent ideological positions, but complex, flawed people who exist in three dimensions. What’s more, the series is preoccupied with some enduringly human themes, central among them the often destructive legacy one generation bequeaths to another, especially when the relationship between a man and his son goes badly wrong. And that story is timeless.
But there’s something else that explains why Our Friends in the North has not dated. Even the supposed history, 30 years in the past when the show was made and 60 years ago now, is current, even urgent. Take one narrative thread that runs throughout: the corruption of the Metropolitan police. In an early episode we see a room in Scotland Yard filled with detectives getting drunk and watching pornography. The scene depicts the vice squad in the 1960s, but given what we now know of Met culture it could just as easily refer to today. Later a supposedly reforming commissioner says he’s cracking down on corrupt officers; in fact, he either pensions them off or moves them to other forces. On Thursday the government effectively conceded that even police found guilty of gross misconduct can currently remain in uniform, promising new powers of automatic dismissal – powers that most voters would surely assume were already in place.
No less striking is what the show has to say about the places where we live. It is a tribute to the genius of Our Friends in the North that it makes municipal housing policy the stuff of riveting drama, with a key storyline based on the real-life scandal involving the former leader of Newcastle city council, T Dan Smith, and the architect John Poulson. A charismatic local Labour leader promises to clear the slums and replace them with “streets in the sky” – cheap, high-rise blocks that will eventually prove damp, rotten and uninhabitable. In the show, the looming towers become a symbol of how a single political decision can wreck lives: to watch it now is to think immediately of the 100 or more schools made of crumbling concrete or of Grenfell on 14 June 2017. “That was a terrible night, watching that and thinking, ‘Christ, nothing changes,’” Flannery told me when we spoke this week.
There are several such moments, when the drama provides not just insight but foresight. The entrepreneur and proto-Thatcherite Tosker wants to move from being a slum landlord to a financier, offering loans to would-be homeowners who can’t actually afford a mortgage: made in 1996, Our Friends in the North anticipates the sub-prime crisis that would trigger the financial crash 12 years later. No less uncanny, there is a pre-run of the “bigoted woman” episode that blighted Gordon Brown’s 2010 campaign, when a Labour campaigner confronts a voter who, in front of the cameras, chides him for allowing unwelcome outsiders to become her neighbours.
It’s all there: dementia, mental illness, inherited trauma – issues that are discussed often and openly now, but which were new ground then. And threaded throughout is what feels like the perennial Labour dilemma: go bold and risk defeat, or tread cautiously and risk failure. “It is perennial,” says Flannery. “It’s certainly repetitive.”
Now aged 71, the writer has lived through the cycle three times. He can recall Harold Wilson taking over as Labour leader, just as “another zombie Tory government was failing”. And yet Labour was cautious, waiting. “They always seem to be waiting for the Tories to fuck it up; they never seem to be on the front foot.”
He had the same thought again in 1996, when the show was first broadcast, in the dog days of the John Major administration. He’d heard Tony and Cherie Blair were watching it, so he wrote to the Labour leader, urging him to take advantage of the landslide that was clearly coming his way and be bolder. (Flannery doesn’t know if the letter ever reached Blair, but he got no reply.) And he sees the same story unfolding now, the familiar fearfulness exhibited in the current Labour leadership: this week the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, ruled out a wealth tax.
Flannery understands Labour’s nervousness, the legacy of serial defeat. He accepts that Labour radicalism gets punished when the Conservatives are strong, but insists that such timidity makes little sense when the Tories are weak – as they are today. If Flannery is right, we are now in one of those all-too-rare periods – they come around perhaps only once every 30 years – when Labour is on the verge of power and can afford to be brave.
Alternatively, you may think there’s a middle way, like the one staked out in a new essay by two Labour policy veterans suggesting a Labour government “will need to move at great pace while crafting a message of patience”. Our Friends in the North does not offer a definitive answer: it’s a compelling human drama, not a position paper. It’ll only be on BBC iPlayer for a fortnight or so longer. Keir Starmer should watch it before it disappears and resolve that, this time, the larger, political story it tells – of Labour hope and disappointment – might just follow a new script.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
