Oil Strike North is a BBC television drama series produced in 1975.
The series was created and produced by Gerard Glaister and dealt with life on Nelson One, a North Sea oil rig owned by the fictional company Triumph Oil. Eschewing the corporate power struggles of Mogul / The Troubleshooters and concentrating on more personal storylines, Oil Strike North was essentially a character study of how workers faced life on the rig and the impact it had on the lives of their families and loved ones.
The scenario was later revived by the BBC for the mid-1990s drama Roughnecks.
Oil Strike North lasted for one series of thirteen episodes. The leading cast members included Nigel Davenport, Glyn Owen, Barbara Shelley, Angela Douglas, Andrew Robertson, Richard Hurndall, Sean Caffrey and Maurice Roëves.
Gerard Glaister later moved onto to produce the Second World War resistance drama Secret Army, the air freight series Buccaneer and then onto the boating soap serial Howards' Way. Two of the leading actors in Oil Strike North, Nigel Davenport and Glyn Owen, also later appeared in Howards' Way.
Famous quotes containing the words oil, strike and/or north:
“I became increasingly anarchistic. I began to find people of my own class vicious, people in clean collars uninteresting. I even accepted smells, personal as well as official. Everyone who came to the studio smelled either of machine oil or herring.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)
“Still, it will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West,
From North and from South, come the pilgrim and guest,
When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board
The old broken links of affection restored,
When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,
And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before.
What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye?
What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?”
—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)