Peter Flannery

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Peter Flannery (born October 12, 1951 in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear) is an English playwright and scriptwriter. In the theatre, he is best known for the work he did while a resident playwright at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His notable plays during his tenure there included Savage Amusement (1978), Awful Knawful (1978) and Our Friends in the North (1982). Other theatre work has included Singer (1989).

He is perhaps best known to a wider audience for his highly-acclaimed television adaptation of Our Friends in the North, produced by the BBC and screened on BBC2 in 1996. The epic nine-part serial, charting the course of the lives of four friends from Newcastle from 1964 to 1995, was in 2000 voted by the British Film Institute as one of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century. Flannery's other television work has included Blind Justice, a 1988 series about the work of radical lawyers. At the 1997 British Academy Television Awards, Flannery was given the honorary Dennis Potter Award for outstanding achievement in television writing.

In January 2007, it was announced that he had scripted an adaptation of Alan Hunter's Inspector Gently novels, entitled George Gently, for BBC One, to be broadcast later in the year. George Gently is produced by Company Pictures, reuniting Flannery with Our Friends in the North producer Charles Pattinson, who co-runs Company and is an executive producer on the series alongside Flannery.^[1]

Flannery has also worked in film, although with less success than in other media. He provided the screenplays for films such as Funny Bones (1995) and The One and Only (2002).