A Few Scrappy Thoughts on 'Our Friends in the North'

Unenthused by much that is on television (even University Challenge is losing its appeal, thanks to the absurd number of non-general science questions inserted to make up for the low standard of the rest) I use my set to watch old films or TV series.

 

And I recently watched, for the first time ‘Our Friends in the North’, which I ignored when it was first on 1996 because every left-wing person I knew kept telling me how wonderful it was, and as a result I dismissed it as some sort of dramatic prelude to the coming Blairite takeover and the resulting vengeance for the Thatcher Terror which had until recently stalked the land, laying waste to the country with cuts.

 

 

Some of it is. The episode concerning the miners’ strike, though it gives  a couple of nods to the fact that Arthur Scargill held no ballot and called a coal strike in the summer, is pretty bog-standard leftist stuff. The miners who want to return to work are (for instance) portrayed as ugly, shifty trolls, the police drafted in from the South as caricature baddies. If only it had all been that simple.

 

But for a lot of it one wishes that there was a novel on which it was based, rather than a long-ago stage play by Peter Flannery (an almost exact contemporary of mine, having been born in October 1951). For it is obvious that the author, and the characters, know a lot of things about each other which the audience never find out. The viewer dips into their lives every few years (often politically significant ones) and has to guess what has happened in between. Each episode fades out with a once-popular song. For me these songs ceased to be familiar very quickly, as I have absolutely no idea of popular music after 1969.

 

But it is a powerful work, well worth watching.  It deals with serious things – the loss of belief on the left ‘We wanted to be part of something that used to exist’; the fact that London had become a sort of Gomorrah long before the sixties got properly under way and that the 1950s, far from being a golden age, had been a pretty squalid and uninspiring period (though the Obscene Publications Act had indeed destroyed any basis on which the police could really keep the porn industry in check) ; the corruption that went hand in hand with town planning. I was rather surprised at how easily some of the characters manage to join the Labour Party in the North-East in the 1960s and 1970s. The joke at the time was that new applicants, who were not in on the tight circle of power,  would be told ‘It’s full’.

 

It even dwells on, though has no answer to, the corruption of life which produces criminal louts, and the desperate sadness that the socialist pursuit of the New Jerusalem, the new houses, the libraries, the schools, do not in fact produce a contented society on their own, and may even be followed by worsening behaviour and morals. For man does not live by bread alone, and never will. As the grime and darkness were swept away, and the smoke cleared, another, less visible shadow fell over the places where the poor lived, the disorder and (later) the drugs. Not but what there’s a pretty accurate portrayal of desperate drunkenness and the hopeless misery of it.

 

I have to say I find it a bit of a stretch that a bright girl such as Mary Soulsby could be inveigled into parting with her virginity in a park, but I suppose if people didn’t behave out of character, the plots of these things could never get properly going.

 

And I was momentarily manoeuvred into sympathy for her boyfriend Nicky, when a collection of newspaper reptiles bait and jeer at him about his rather tricky past and it his attitude to the IRA. Then I remembered that there was actually a sub-machine gun still buried in his father’s back garden, a relic of his flirtation with Angry-Brigade-type terrorism. I have to say that my lot of leftists would never have had anything to do with that sort of thing. We didn’t like it, or think it worthwhile, and we knew very well it would disgust the tough old war veterans who still inhabited the Labour movement in large numbers in those days and who as Linda Grant says in her book about that that time ‘Upstairs at the Party’ , had already had their minds expanded quite enough in the Western Desert or on the D-day beaches.

 

 

Much of the portrayal of the North in the 1960s and 1970s reminded me of my time in York in 1970 to 1973. The North at that time still had a strong savour of the industrial revolution, a deeper blackness in the soot on the railway bridges, a darker light even in summer, a colder, sharper snap in the foggy winter air than you’d find now.  I have never forgotten the symbolic end of the age of coal, when they burned off the old town gas in the pipes in York, before pumping in the new stuff from the North Sea, and the streets were full of great iron torches glowing red, mounted above manholes which gave on to the gas mains. It lent the shabby streets a slightly hellish, glamorous air. It also made me think of the scruffy bit of Cambridge around the East Road where I offered my public-school self to help canvass for Labour in March 1966, and the actual night of the election on March 31st , out on the fringes of oxford, knocking up the last of the voters for Harold Wilson. I have it in mind as a grey, windy twilight. I wonder if it really was. If only I’d known what I was doing.

 

And, as an active Trotskyist troublemaker, I spent quite a lot of time on council estates and at factory gates, or outside docks and mines. Many of the scenes brought all that back, sometimes more than I expected.

 

But who were these people in the drama? A young man with a father in the Shipyards who went on the Jarrow March, has won a place at Manchester University, and spent the summer on Civil Rights marches in the American South (where almost nobody form Britain could go in 1964, not least because of the severe foreign currency restrictions and the lack of cheap flights or sea passages). How did he do that, when his father is a shipyard worker who went, as a child, on the Jarrow March? How can he and his girlfriend ( a near neighbour)  understand the dirty joke in French that they share during what I think is an episode of what we used to call ‘heavy petting’ (Is it just me? Do most people really like watching actors simulating sexual acts on the TV screen, or does everyone find it an embarrassing turn-off, as I do)?

I suppose it must be assumed that (as this is 1964, when university rare and French, then as now, not widely spoken on the banks of the Tyne, Wear or Tees) both of them went to grammar school.  But it still doesn’t explain the American trip.

 

Funny how this part of our great social revolution, the grammar schools, isn’t even alluded to, though without it these people would not have been who they were.

 

It’s always that which haunts me when I look back at that time, the wide-open door through which the shipyard workers’ sons and daughters could make their way to the very top of everything, and did.

 

Now there are neither shipyards nor grammar schools. I’m not sure which loss I feel more keenly.