It takes some brass neck to look at one of the most destructive events in London’s history, which destroyed a chunk of the poorest part of the city and left an estimated 70,000 people homeless, and think that it wasn’t dramatic enough. But that must have been what went through the head of Tom Bradby, the political editor of ITV News, when he was writing his four-part drama: we were deeply immersed in espionage, war, assassination plots, kidnap and a spendthrift, philandering king before as much as a single spark began to fly.
Unless, that is, we were to consider the sparks between hapless baker Thomas Farriner (Andrew Buchan), in whose bakery the fire began, and his possibly just-widowed sister-in-law Sarah (Rose Leslie). Given what little is known about the causes of the fire, I suppose there is every chance that it could have been avoided had some sleazy character not insisted on leaving his two young daughters unattended while he walked a cutie home - it’s certainly more believable than Daniel Mays in a sloppy wig as Samuel Pepys.
Buchan’s take on Farriner was hard-working but headstrong
Bradby and Buchan’s take on Farriner was hard-working but headstrong, as we saw in an early scene when he knocked the wig from the head of the navy contractor who owed him money for biscuits. “You’ll regret this,” said contractor hissed, but by the end of the day finding money to buy his next bag of flour was the least of Farriner’s worries. Meanwhile in Westminster, a playboy King Charles II (Jack Huston) was doing that slow yet tremendously complicated dance which shows up in all the period dramas (below right), giving him plenty of time to make eyes at all the ladies of the kingdom oblivious both to the watchful glare of his heavily pregnant wife and the fact that the country no longer had the money to pay its bills.
He was also able to miss a woefully inept murder attempt, foiled by his honest-to-God head of security services Lord Denton (Charles Dance). At the same time, Denton had been posing as a kindly old parishioner to ingratiate himself with Sarah, in order to recruit her as a spy against her Catholic employer who was suspected of conspiracy in a plot against the king. In a refreshing change from those spy dramas with more contemporary settings, such as recent Andrew Buchan vehicle The Honourable Woman, Denton was already proving twice as effective despite having none of the technology.
With plenty of sub-plots to establish, it was two thirds of the way through this first hour before the fire got started - and still longer before it could in any way be described as ‘great’. At this point ITV’s decision to screen the drama over consecutive nights began to make sense, as otherwise it would likely be Christmas before we were done. With the two Farriner girls trapped in the upstairs bedroom of the burning bakery the peril was pushed to the max in the closing ten minutes - but with so much to sit through before we got there it’ll take a lower boredom threshold than mine to endure the next three parts.