74. Our Friends In The North

It's another crossover episode. With a cast led by Daniel Craig and Christopher Eccleston, Our Friends in the North is one of the all-time great BBC dramas: a 31 year story of social housing policy, Labour infighting, police corruption and municipal decline.It's thus about as CityMetric-y a drama as you could ever hope to imagine – plus it's bloody good, not least because it begins with James Bond and Dr Who trying to start a rock n roll band in ‘60s Newcastle. I'd been toying with doing an episode on the subject when the writer Emma Burnell asked me to talk about it on The Zeitgeist Tapes, the podcast she'd just launched with Steve Fielding, a professor of politics at the University of Nottingham. So – this is that episode, originally released last autumn.This is also, incidentally, Skylines' 2nd birthday. We can almost walk. Thanks for listening to my nonsense.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman's cities site, CityMetric. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.