Looking at all the reviews here claiming this as the greatest British TV drama ever and looking at all the awards it won and rave reviews it got, I'm just left asking if there's another show out there called our Friends in the North, because the one I finally finished slogging through on video is a template for every bad I-wanna-be-Ken-Loach cliché out there. I can't vouch for the London scenes, which look as unbelievable as any of the amateur-hour post-Lock Stock gangster movies we slept through over the past few years, but the Newcastle scenes play like a bad joke - the Beeb drama department's version of the 'Thick Scousers' characters that Harry Enfield used to do in his TV show. Every possible cliché is ladled on with a trowel and with heavy handed dialogue that sounds like someone reading from a manifesto or a history book. The performances are also either incredibly self-important - Eccleston in the first of his humourless pompous leftwing stereotypes and McKee so smug you want someone to thump her stand out especially - or so over the top it's not even funny (yes, Malcolm McDowell, I do mean you).
Sure there are a few big themes, but they're swamped by the trite writing, dodgy performance (and bad old-age makeup) and blah direction. Forget all the raves. This is just an unconvincing, overlong timewaster, one of the great so whats? of British television.
Sure there are a few big themes, but they're swamped by the trite writing, dodgy performance (and bad old-age makeup) and blah direction. Forget all the raves. This is just an unconvincing, overlong timewaster, one of the great so whats? of British television.