Peter Flannery (born 12 October 1951) is an Englishplaywright andscreenwriter. He was born inJarrow,Tyne and Wear and educated at theUniversity of Manchester. He is best known for his work while a resident playwright at theRoyal Shakespeare Company in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Notable plays during his tenure include:Savage Amusement (1978),Awful Knawful (1978), andOur Friends in the North (1982). Other theatre work has includedSinger (1989).
He is perhaps best known to a wider audience for his highly-acclaimed television adaptation ofOur Friends in the North, produced by theBBC and screened onBBC2 in 1996. The epic nine-partserial, charting the course of the lives of four friends from Newcastle from 1964 to 1995, was voted by theBritish Film Institute in 2000 as one of the100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century. Flannery's other television work has includedBlind Justice (1988), a series about the work of radical lawyers. At the 1997British Academy Television Awards, Flannery was given the honoraryDennis Potter Award for outstanding achievement in television writing.
In January 2007, he scripted an adaptation ofAlan Hunter'sInspector Gently novels, entitledGeorge Gently, forBBC One to be broadcast later in the year. Flannery changed the setting of the stories fromSuffolk to theNorth East in the 1960s and created new characters who had not featured in the novels.George Gently is produced byCompany Pictures, reuniting Flannery withOur Friends in the North producerCharles Pattinson, who co-runs Company and is anexecutive producer on the series alongside Flannery.[1] The drama was eventually shown on 8 April 2007. The seventh series – now titledInspector George Gently – was screened in the spring of 2015, and the eighth and final series comprising just two episodes in 2017.
Flannery has also worked in film, although with less success than in other media. He wrote thescreenplays for films such asFunny Bones (1995) andThe One and Only (2002).
In 2008,Channel 4 transmitted Flannery's mini-series about theEnglish Civil War,The Devil's Whore, on which he had worked for more than a decade.[2] In 2014, the channel released a four-part continuation, titledNew Worlds. This series was set in England and America in the 1680s and was co-written by Martine Brandt. It featured various characters of a new generation, played byJamie Dornan,Freya Mavor,Joe Dempsie,Eve Best,Jeremy Northam, andAlice Englert.
Flannery's stage adaptation ofNikita Mikhalkov's filmBurnt by the Sun opened at theNational Theatre, London, in March 2009.[3] The cast includedIrish actorCiarán Hinds as General Kotov,Rory Kinnear as Mitya, andMichelle Dockery as Maroussia.[4]
Flannery lives inWallingford, Oxfordshire.
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