Last week Eccleston and writer Peter Flannery attended a special screening of an episode set in 1984 at the Tyneside Cinema in which the characters find themselves in the middle of the miners’ strike.
Flannery said he wanted to write about it because he felt contemporary media coverage, including BBC News, had been biased against the pickets.
“People were watching a very biased, approximate news coverage of a strike and a group of people who had been demonised by politicians.
“I thought that was completely unfair and since I had the opportunity to write about it I was going to,” he said.
“I got quite a few letters about Our Friends in the North but the most I got were about that episode and they were from young people who said through watching it they got a completely different sense of what the pit strikes were all about and how it was conducted.”