"NEW Britain!" proclaims the Labour Party election leaflet which the hero of BBC 2's new drama serial distributes door to door. After 13 years of Tory misrule, the boil of "decay, dereliction and despair" is ripe for lancing.
Sounds familiar? Only if you were around in 1964. Because the prime minister in waiting is Harold Wilson, not Tony Blair. Although necessarily viewed through the prism of hindsight (and inevitably selective selection) the then and now parallels in the first episode of Our Friends In The North are nonetheless uncanny and might have been thought reason enough to shelve the series.
Yet it is just these parallels that finally persuaded the BBC to find the courage to film and screen it. Because Our Friends is no election fever cash crop but a hot potato originally commissioned 14 years ago. It grew out of a stag& play written by Peter Flannery for the opening of the Pit, the Royal Shakespeare Company's second theatre in London. But the time to screen the work was never quite right. Politics, it seems, can be a vehicle for comedy (Yes Minister); melodrama (The House Of Cards trilogy); farce (Alan B'Stard); or sex (The Politician's Wife) but - apart from Alan Bleasdale's tangential sideswipe in GBH - not serious drama.
At feast riot by the BBC whose paymasters, when all is said and done, are MPs. Few people under 30 in Britain today have any real memory or understanding of life under Labour, yet it, is these young voters who will probably determine the colour of the next Westminster government. Whether this had any role in the BBC's decision to go ahead is not known. Michael Jackson, controller of BBC 2, says he finally decided to make it because "it is so pertinent, with an election coming up and another new Labour party making promises".
Certainly, as the first few episodes of Our Friends makes abundantly clear, sleaze, greed and corruption were not always synonymous with the right. One of the greatest scandals of the postwar building boom was the double act of T. Dan Smith (leader of Newcastle City Council) and the architect John Poulson. Although the names have been changed, nobody who lived through the last 30 years will fail to recognise the parade of those who seemed to believe that power was their birthright.
Our Friend should not, however, be seen as an exercise in Labour bashing. Delighted as Tories will undoubtedly be to see the Opposition's skeletons being rattled in the first few episodes, their time comes a little further in.
"In the end, what comes through in Our Friends is disillusionment with politics and everything politicians say they can offer," says Michael Wearing, head of BBC drama serials.
From the evidence of the first episode, Our Friends In The North will he required watching for the next two months. Framed around the lives of four young (fictional) friends, too young to vote in the 1964 election, it follows them through the next 30 years, their personal histories meshing with the history of their city and their country, the action shifting from Newcastle to London and back again right through to the present day. Three are comparative unknowns; one, Christopher Eccleston, will be familiar from Cracker and Hearts and Minds. Behind them the east (huge - 180 named characters, 3,000 extras) bristles with some of the classiest actors in the business, including Alun Armstrong and David Bradley, whose rare appearances on television should be savoured. As icing on the cake we are given Malcolm McDowell (If and The Clockwork Orange) making his first appearance this side of the Atlantic for 15 years.
A major problem for a drama based on real (and in this case pretty unpalatable) events and people is the danger of slander and libel. During the 15 years of its gestation the author, Peter Flannery, was obliged to change and re write characters and events to satisfy the BBC's legal department. At one time, it seems, the lawyers even wanted the whole thing set in a fictitious country called Albion. Every storyline presented problems. Even though both T. Dan Smith and John Poulson served prison sentences, it was only because both are now dead that the storyline based on their misdeeds survived.
The same applies to the character of a Tory home secretary generally accepted to be based on Reginald Maudling, chairman of two of Poulson's companies. The original stage drama and series that was built from it covered 15 years from 1964 to 1979. It now runs to 30. In the succeeding years, contemporary history itself radically changed the drama's shape.
"It is ironic," says Flannery, "that the politics which form such a central part of the story should have been so significant in shaping the genesis of a project which I started in my late 20s and have only now just completed as I approach my mid 40s." Flannery himself has grown up with his characters. "I now see things differently to the way I did when the work began."
NEWCASTLE is now one of the more successful British cities. The shipbuilding, coal mining land of When The Boat Comes In has disappeared.
And that change has happened over the last 30 years.
One of the architects of that success, Sir John Hull, the tycoon who built the Gateshead Metro Centre, and now owner of Newcastle United FC (who for the first time in their history are poised to win the League, the FA or Coca Cola cups) was himself once a character in the series, around the time of the miners' strike of 1984. Although the strike survives (a vast exercise including a cast of more than 500 extras) his character has disappeared as have others. Storylines have also been dropped, including, it is reported, a plot about a Saudi construction deal negotiated via Downing Street while Margaret Thatcher was in power and a storyline about the Labour party being dominated by media "spin doctors".
By the end, Peter Flannery himself was both exhausted and disappointed. He is reported as saying that he would never again contemplate such a project.
As Michael Wearing explains: "The whole area of fictional reconstruction around real events is a minefield for the BBC." So enjoy it while you may.