Our Friends In The North

Joe Gilgun and Michelle Keegan star in a madcap new comedy drama about a group of close-knit friends in Lancashire

- Tess Lemacraft

A new six-part comedy series comes to Sky One this week starring Joe Gilgun and a host of other wellknown faces including Michelle Keegan, Damien Molony and Dominic West. Set in Lancashire and kicking off with a double bill, Brassic focuses on the tight-knit friendship between a group of working-class mates and the harebrained schemes they employ to get along in life – and the often hilarious consequences when things don’t go to plan.

‘A lot of it is based on genuine truth and 90 per cent of the characters are based on real people or are amalgamations of real people,’ says Gilgun, who grew up in the town of Chorley, Lancashire.

LOVABLE ECCENTRICS

‘There isn’t an awful lot to do in Chorley, so it tends to breed these bizarre people. There’s a guy in Chorley we call Corned Beef Keith. He’s always got his bum half hanging out of his trousers. And there’s another guy who, for no explicable reason, always wears a wig on backwards.’

Gilgun had always wanted to write a TV series with similarly eccentric and larger-than-life characters, and he reveals it was a conversation with Hollywood star Dominic West, best known for The Wire and