The classic TV drama is adapted for the radio and brought up to date with a new episode set in 2020.
The future stars of Doctor Who and James Bond - Christopher Eccleston and Daniel Craig - in Our Friends in the North
"I hadn't looked at it for years and years and years," says its writer Peter Flannery, who has now revisited it to adapt it"I thought it stood up pretty well. The writing was good, the production was exceptionally good and the strength of the acting has kept it young." "And the thing I still find the most worrying, and I did at the time, is the awful state that the Metropolitan Police is in."
He says: "The scope and the scale of it is stunning. Not just the timeframe, but that the breadth of the issues that he deals with. At the same time, it's incredibly intimate. Its heart is the focus on these hugely compelling, hugely personal stories. In his 2020 book The Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain, Phil Harrison wrote that "the quartet felt like living, breathing representatives of us, as we grappled with the dilemmas of the era".
Like Flanagan, Usden has tried to balance the personal and the political. One of the other big themes of the original was about how parents affect - in other words, mess up - their children.