The Great Fire

Entertaining not boring. Drama not documentary.

Tiled roofs and too wide streets. Actors emerged with lovely clean bright clothes and faces. Tiled roofs ? At least it was a bit more down and dirty by the finale.

Charles Dance did his normal towering authoritarian part very well, Andrew Buchan a solid professional but dangerous baker.

Completely ridiculous... the common man would never had access to Charlie the second ? And Sammy Pepys was a bit off the other wall .... It is true he buried his wine but not sure that Theresa Mays the stern approach for the part. It looked like he was Made in Dagenham.

However it's ok to watch on a rainy night when you aren't burning the house down.

Everyone knows the Popish Plot was a fabricated story. Cannot believe they'd make a movie about a real event, the fire, and use an obvious fake story to try to "enhance" it. Ugh.

About the 1666 Great Fire of London to the soap opera Eastenders That's a bit harsh. Eastenders is about nothing...blah about people who live in certain parts.

This had a point. The devastating fire.

However the spoilt it, at least in my opinion by all this plotting and stuff with the KIng and Catholics.

Sure these things happened around the same time period, but thats a different tale.

The miniseries is about the fire but the fire hardly comes into it. Instead we gets lots of sex, politics and conspiracy.

In a bid for quality, a lot of familiar actors from the best TV series around today are brought in. We get Ben Crompton, Rose Leslie and Charles Dance from GOT but so? I see actors in the UK pop up in all sorts of stuff, good things, bad things.

This doesn't make the film, or series.

I lost interest part way through. If they had stuck to the fire, the effects on normal people, the after effects also, it would have been much more interesting.

And sex doesn't make me watch something, unless it is the story or helps the story, then leave it out.

No-one was worrying about who screwed who while their businesses and homes went up in flames.

I thought this was very badly written, and not worth watching. Every one in it has been so badly flawed as to be unbelievable. Not a fan I am afraid. The cast were trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ears. It seemed more a script more suited to Eastendfers, another program which I cannot be bothered to watch. No celebration of how well organized the society must have been that only 6 people perished. We think of our society as being so enlightened and modern, but I doubt that the outcome of a fire in London today of such magnitude would be so well managed with so little loss of life. There was an opportunity here to show the courage and fantastic organisation skills of our ancestors, instead we get 2nd rate intrigues and the baseness of human frailties which are not entertainng to watch, much admit to. And, quite honestly, not something that is often common in these sorts of situations. Pitifully bad storyline, which had the potential to be good.

Another viewer compared this would-be miniseries exploring the 1666 Great Fire of London to EASTENDERS and I think they were spot on: this is extraordinarily disappointing given the effort and level of talent involved, and says a lot about the current state of the ITV drama department.

The miniseries is about the fire but the fire hardly comes into it. Instead we gets lots of uninteresting soap opera shenanigans involving sex, politics and conspiracy. The characterisation is on the level of a provincial pantomime and never once did I believe in or care about any of the sub-plots.

In a bid for quality, a lot of familiar actors from the best TV series around today are brought in. We get Rose Leslie and Charles Dance from A GAME OF THRONES and Jack Huston from BOARDWALK EMPIRE, but none of them are at their best. And they're sidelined in favour of Daniel Mays, who's out of his league playing Pepys (who seems to be a bit of a twit) and the singularly wooden Andrew Buchan. No, THE GREAT FIRE is a chore to sit through and there's nothing here I can recommend to any viewer.