Our Friends in the North

- Season 1

(1996)

Twenty-year-old Nicky Hutchinson returns to Newcastle in 1964 after several months working in the southern United States, where he participated in the emerging Civil Rights Movement in New Orleans. He first visits his girlfriend, Mary Soulsby, who is living with her parents and her disabled brother Patrick. He later has a small birthday gathering with Mary, his parents, Felix and Florrie, best friend George 'Geordie' Peacock and local councillor Eddie Wells, a friend of Felix's. After arguing with Felix about his past involving the Jarrow March, Nicky begins to ...

Berger has been placed in a mental institution, where he is visited by Chief Inspector Roy Johnson and continues to proclaim that the Met is corrupt. After Johnson tells him that he is not senior enough to start an investigation into the allegations, Berger hangs himself. Mary has married Tosker and is bringing up their one-year-old son in a newly built high-rise council flat on Willow Lane that was pushed for by Austin Donohue, together with the construction developer John Edwards. The cafe Geordie worked in has been shut down, leading him to seek work with a Soho ...

Despite having their second child, Mary and Tosker's marriage continues to fall apart, as their Willow Lane flat becomes riddled with damp and insanitary. Geordie has become a close confidante of Benny Barratt's, enabling him to live a very comfortable existence, although he has been pursuing an affair with Julia. Barratt quickly discovers the affair, but remains silent about it. Nicky, completely disillusioned with the Labour Party, has begun to turn to the anarchist movement and is in a relationship with a radical, middle-class anarchist. The pair have a disastrous ...

Nicky is now living in a squat in London with a group of armed anarchist extremists, intent on bringing down Edward Heath and his government by force. Geordie, through his connections with the Met, manages to track Nicky down and takes him for a night out in Soho, which proves disastrous as the two men have so little in common anymore. Geordie's position is suddenly threatened when a police officer names him as colluding with other officers, and an investigation into corruption in the police is instigated. Roy Johnson, who has been promoted, is asked to lead it, ...

Under the new leadership of Commissioner Jellicoe, the Met are finally beginning to crack down on the Soho porn industry, as well as their own internal corruption. Chapple announces his intention to retire, aiming to escape discovery. Meanwhile, the police have begun to quietly investigate the activities of Austin Donohue, interviewing a now bankrupt John Edwards in the process. Edwards gives the police Nicky's name in relation to a missing folder of Donohue's that they believe would prove incriminating. Nicky has remained in Newcastle, now living in the decrepit ...

Tosker and Mary's marriage has disintegrated to the point where it is completely over, but for the sake of their children, Anthony and Bernadette, they stay together. Depressed and worried about the loss of his hair, Tosker frequents local nightclubs with Geordie and together they have continual one-night stands. Nicky has returned to more conventional politics and wins selection as the Labour Party candidate in the constituency next door to Eddie Wells MP, who has since rejoined the Labour Party himself. His Conservative opponent Claudia Seabrook, the daughter of the...

As the miners' strike is dominates all political life across the country, Mary has become Leader of Newcastle City Council and is actively supporting the miners, but her son Anthony finds himself on the frontline of the conflict having become a policeman. Nicky, whose career as a photographer has begun to take off, works with Eddie Wells to investigate the involvement of local businesses in breaking the strike at the same time as a now heavily balding Tosker is doing deals with these men. At first the relationship between the miners and the local police is friendly, ...

Nicky and Mary have been married for two years, and Mary has just become a grandmother. Nicky has become a very successful photographer who has had many books of his work published. As Leader of the Council, Mary is faced with hard decisions involving making cuts in services and being restricted from all she would like to do by new government regulations. Felix has become very senile due to the onset of Alzheimer's disease and Florrie, realising she can no longer cope, puts him into a home. Christopher Collins, who used to torment Felix and Florrie as a youth, is ...

Nicky, who has been living in Italy for many years, returns to Newcastle to arrange Florrie's funeral. Felix is now in the full grip of Alzheimer's disease and no longer recognises people around him or what is going on. Reading letters left to him by his mother, Nicky finds out more about his father and learns of his lifetime feeling of failure after the Jarrow March achieved nothing. In an attempt to change this feeling in his father Nicky takes him to see a woman in Yorkshire who remembers the Jarrow Marchers, including Felix, coming through her village and the ...