Stuart Urban’s work takes in historical drama, true crime and fetish subculture. We value the patient ensemble direction of Our Friends in the North, though its success belongs to several directors rather than one.
Fi1m perspective
In Our Friends in the North (1996), an exchange is allowed to settle before the drama moves on. We were moved by its difficult domestic silences, because the performances make disappointment painfully personal. That patience is what we value in the direction credited to Stuart Urban, Pedr James and Simon Cellan Jones. The series earns its length by giving us time to notice what the actors are doing, rather than hurrying them towards the next event.
Urban’s route through television included Bergerac and The Bill, before his breakthrough as writer-director of An Ungentlemanly Act (1992). His subsequent features included Preaching to the Perverted (1997), which took him into fetish subculture. He later directed the documentary Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead (2007), and wrote and executive-produced the true-crime miniseries The Secret (2016). Writing has been a substantial part of that career, not merely an occasional addition to the directing.
There is a limit to how much of Our Friends in the North we can credit to Urban. He left the production after creative disagreements, and some of his work was reshot. Its strengths belong to a shared production, and it has weaknesses too: Peter Flannery sometimes rushes the public history. The domestic scenes are more patient, allowing warmth and difficult silences to do their work.
Rob Hinds’s production design gives the rooms an everyday familiarity that keeps the actors at the centre of attention. James Keast’s costumes let the passing years register without turning each new appearance into an event. Colin Towns’s music can press too hard on feelings the faces already convey, though its quieter contributions work well. Start with Our Friends in the North, provided there is room for a long serial that does not hurry its actors.
Biography
Stuart Urban is a British film and television director, writer and producer. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Modern History, he began directing television drama in the early 1980s.
In 1992 he wrote and directed the BAFTA-winning single drama An Ungentlemanly Act, about the opening days of the Falklands War. He was one of the directors of the acclaimed BBC serial Our Friends in the North (1996), directing the Soho sequences among other episodes. Urban has also written, produced and directed the feature films Preaching to the Perverted (1997) and Revelation (2001).
