What's it about anyway? 
It's about four working class friends (three men and one woman) from Newcastle and their paths through life from the early 1960s to the mid 1990s. In the first episode (there are nine, each running for just over an hour), they're in their late teens or early twenties, and in the final episode they're pushing fifty. Craig was in his late twenties when filming took place, but he manages to play a much older man in the final episodes - all the actors are aged with makeup as the series progresses, but it never seems fake or distracting.
OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH follows these four people (and other characters) across the decades as they struggle to make their way in the world. Each episode is set in a particular year, and the following episode always takes place at least a couple of years later, which means that at the start of every new episode the characters are in a different place in their lives. The episodes are: 1964, 1966, 1967, 1970, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1987 and 1995.
OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH shows people changing (or not) and coming to terms (or not) with shattered dreams and the various reversals life throws our way. But it's not just a decades-spanning soap opera. Each episode is set against a particular political/social backdrop (e.g. 1984 sees the characters caught up in the war between Thatcher and the striking miners), and so the series as a whole also portrays the changes to a nation across thirty years. Nicky (Christopher Eccleston) is a committed idealist who desperately wants to better people's lives, and a major strand of the saga is how he tries to make his way in various political roles, e.g. outlaw radical with bombs and guns in the early '70s, trying to get elected as a Member of Parliament in 1979, and working as a crusading photojournalist in the '80s, all the time coming up against the corruption of those in power.
But it ain't just politics: OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH also deals with such matters as the sex trade in London and corruption in the Metropolitan Police in the '70s, Freemasonry, the breakdown of the traditional family and the problems of caring for the elderly, the rise and fall of the stock market yuppie, and so on. It's about ideals, relationships and friendships, and it's 100% true and real. It's also unbeatable entertainment, supremely gripping from start to finish. There's not a single false note or period of boredom across the 10-hour+ running time, and it's easily the best-written and best-acted thing I've ever seen.
If I had to compare it to what I've seen from across the pond, I'd say it's similar to THE WIRE (which I'm also a big fan of), in that it encompasses so many different aspects of life and society at the same time as it follows a group of people over the years, e.g. in season two of THE WIRE it takes a look at port workers and unions, and then moves onto a different segment of society in the third season, and so on. I'd also compare it to WATCHMEN in that it's such a huge, ambitious and moving piece of work that makes you invest emotionally in so many characters and raises so many different thought-provoking issues.
If you decide to check out OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH, Tarl, it's my guess that you'll find a lot of the dialogue hard to follow (many characters speak exclusively in Newcastle-ese English). It's like when I watch THE WIRE - quite a lot of the time I can't understand exactly what people are saying. I mean, I get the gist, of course, but I find I have to tune my ear in. However, when I watch THE WIRE I'm so absorbed by the power of the show's world and performances and dramatic tension that it doesn't really matter that I find some of the dialogue tough to understand, and I hope that you'd have the same reaction if you sat down to OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH.
Over here in Britain, OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH is commonly considered the best thing ever done by the BBC. It's our SOPRANOS or WIRE.
BTW, Craig's character, Geordie, is in some ways a working class version of Bond. He's a tough guy and ladies' man, not too bright but with a good heart underneath the rough exterior and very loyal to his friends and employers and what he believes to be right. Imagine the Bond of CASINO ROYALE if he hadn't gone to what Vesper refers to as that expensive school and had instead had to live by his wits and fists in a very hard world that deals him some extremely cruel blows, and you've more or less got Geordie.
For me, Geordie is the soul and spirit of OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH. The show's "message", I think, is that life is very tough and probably won't go according to plan, but that integrity ultimately counts more than ideals, and love for one's friends is the most important thing. Which probably sounds cheesy, but, trust me, there's no cheap sentimentality in this series, just real and riveting drama with the emotional power of a nuke.
I guess the greatest tribute I can pay to OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH is that I almost never felt I was watching acting. I felt I was watching real people. And I came to care about them as though they were my own friends.
One thing I remember about it's original run: it's timeslot (I think it was on at 9 on Monday nights. I don't know why I retain such uselss information) was taken over by a thing called THIS LIFE, also a big success, even though now it just looks like FRIENDS filmed with shakey camerawork.
Ah, I loved THIS LIFE. Wonder whether it's on DVD? I didn't bother to see the reunion special of a coupla years ago, which sounded a bit unnecessary and shark-jumping, but I loved the original series. Now, it's not OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH - nothing is, but it's still very good indeed.
Did you ever see ATTACHMENTS? By the same team as THIS LIFE, I believe. It's also pretty decent.
