Our Friends in the North is a British television drama. A serial produced by the BBC and originally screened in nine episodes on BBC2 in early 1996, Our Friends tells the story of four friends from the city of Newcastle in North East England over 31 years from 1964 to 1995. The storyline includes real political and social events both specific to the north-east and from Britain as a whole during the era portrayed. The show is commonly regarded as having been one of the most successful BBC television dramas of the 1990s. It was also a controversial production in some respects, as the issues and occurrences upon which its fiction were based involved real politicians and political events. It took several years before the production–adapted from a play originally performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company–finally made it to the screen, due in part to the BBC's fear that it might become involved in legal action.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Friends_in_the_North

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

366: The Alamanni crossed the frozen Rhine in large numbers to invade the Roman Empire. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamanni)

533: Mercurius became Pope John II, the first pope to adopt a new name upon elevation to the papacy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_II)

1492: Reconquista: Los Reyes Católicos expelled Boabdil of Granada (pictured), the last of the Moorish rulers, from the Iberian Peninsula. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista)

1946: Unable to resume his reign after World War II, King Zog of Albania abdicated but retained his claim to the throne. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zog_of_Albania)

1949: Luis Muñoz Marín became the first democratically elected Governor of Puerto Rico. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Mu%C3%B1oz_Mar%C3%ADn)

_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:

"How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection...That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers." -- Isaac Asimov (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov)