'Our Friends in the North changed my life'
Peter Harris/BBCActor Christopher Eccleston says the day he landed a part in an acclaimed BBC drama was "life-changing".
Eccleston, whose career has included Doctor Who, was cast in the award-winning Our Friends in the North in the 1990s.
He returned to Tyneside to mark the 30th anniversary of the show, which also helped launch the careers of Daniel Craig, Gina McKee and Mark Strong.
The 62-year-old said: "It changed my life, changed my career, completely and utterly. Without Our Friends in the North I wouldn't have a career."
The nine-part series followed four friends from Newcastle with the early episodes set in the 1960s before following them through their lives to 1995 examining issues such as social decay, sleaze and police and local government corruption.
"I knew it was special," Eccleston said.
"I was 30, not long out of drama school and getting to play a character from the age of 19 to 50 by the end of it.
"I'm never going to have an opportunity like that again to play the arc of a character's life from youthful idealism to middle-aged embittered failure."
Last week Eccleston and writer Peter Flannery attended a special screening of an episode set in 1984 at the Tyneside Cinema in which the characters find themselves in the middle of the miners' strike.
Flannery said he wanted to write about it because he felt contemporary media coverage, including BBC News, had been biased against the pickets.
"People were watching a very biased, approximate news coverage of a strike and a group of people who had been demonised by politicians.
"I thought that was completely unfair and since I had the opportunity to write about it I was going to," he said.
"I got quite a few letters about Our Friends in the North but the most I got were about that episode and they were from young people who said through watching it they got a completely different sense of what the pit strikes were all about and how it was conducted."
In the episode, Eccleston's character, photo journalist Nicky Hutchinson, is punched by a police officer during violent disturbances in a pit village.
Our Friends in the North began as a stage play before the TV series was created and will return in the autumn at Newcastle's Theatre Royal in an adaptation set in the Thatcher era.
Flannery will not be involved in the writing but says the themes will resonate with a modern day audience because "nothing has changed".
He said: "I think they'll recognise the world that it's set in, they'll recognise inequality, they'll recognise injustice and I think they'll recognise corruption."