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Browsing Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Media by Subject "18th Century"

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    ‘London. My city. It was a monstrous place.’ Mapping and materialising Georgian London in City of Vice (Channel 4, 2008)
    (Conference Paper: CREAM, University of Westminster in association with University of Brighton, 2022-07-28) Monk, Claire
    For five weeks in January to February 2008, up to 2.7million Channel 4 viewers each week (an 11% audience share for the 9pm peak post-watershed slot) were hooked by the historical drama series City of Vice set in 18th-century London – and particularly by its opening sequence, in which a birds-eye-view camera travelled along the Thames from east to west, passing the Tower of London, before sweeping inland at St Pauls and continuing along Fleet Street to zoom down onto Covent Garden market and nearby Bow Street. This opening sequence was accompanied by a sombre cello, and the equally sombre narratorial voice of actor Ian McDiarmid, cast as Henry Fielding, the celebrated 18th-century novelist and dramatist, but also (less widely known) appointed in around 1748 as Magistrate of Westminster and Middlesex: London’s chief magistrate. However, City of Vice – set, with precision, in 1753 – established the Georgian capital for its viewers not by manipulating aerial filmed footage of the real city, nor via use of exterior location shots – but by filming John Rocque’s 1746 Map of London (itself a cartographic feat which had taken 10 years to complete), then using CGI techniques to bring Rocque’s map to three-dimensional life. Both this opening sequence and the wider dramatic and materialisation strategies used in each episode propelled viewers through the drawn map(ped) streets, swooping aerially across the virtual Georgian city to land at precise real locations where the 3D map burns and fuses into the filmed live-action sequences of each week’s narrative. Produced by Touchpaper Television (a subsidiary of RDF Media) and Justin Hardy’s company Hardy & Sons for Channel 4, directed by Hardy and Dan Reed, and written by Clive Bradley and Peter Harness, with the social and women’s historian Hallie Rubenhold as its historical advisor, City of Vice’s subject was the struggle – spearheaded personally by Fielding with his younger brother John Fielding (Iain Glen) (also a magistrate: ‘the blind beak of Bow Street’, blind since youth) – to give London its tiny first police force, the Bow Street Runners. The Fieldings hoped, idealistically, to bring peace and order to the brutal, chaotic, crime-ridden capital: a place of grotesque inequality and constant danger, made ‘monstrous’ by ‘commerce and trade’, where ‘everything was available, at a price’ (Fielding in City of Vice, Episode 1). Moreover, City of Vice’s storylines, as well as its overall conceit and historical London topography, drew closely on primary historical sources and documents: the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (at a date when the Old Bailey Online project’s digitisation of these records for public access was still a work in progress), the Newgate Calendar and Henry Fielding’s own diaries/memoirs. In a further innovation, Channel 4 Education commissioned an historically accurate interactive game counterpart to the series, Bow Street Runner.