Product Description

Channel 4's brand new graphic five part period drama, based on the life of magistrate and classic author Henry Fielding. This drama follows his quest to clean up the streets of Covent Garden in the 1800s.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2176 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-02-18
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 250 minutes

Synopsis
Drama looking at the formation of The Bow Street Runners--a precursor to the police force--in London to deal with rampant levels of crime and prostitution in 1793.

Customer Reviews

'London needed a police force'
Im a sucker for 18th Century history. The politics - the culture - the economics. Its the raw energy that is beginning to unleashed as society was changing - changes that brought both good and ill. Nothing illustrates this more than City of Vice.

Vivid and colourful - each episodes bring to life the darker side of 18th Century London. Intermixed with the solving of the cases - there are marvelous graphics that take you through the streets London. The effects themselves are almost like watching an old map rise up in front of you.

The cast are on top form. Watching the Fielding brothers is like reading a Sherlock Holmes book. Brothers standing between 'proper society' and the darkness that lurks around the alley ways and slums of old London. The criminals they encounter are not your garden variety bad guys. Very often the Fieldings despite being repulsed by what they see - are powerless to actually do something. This is vividly illustrated in an episode that looks at the exploitation of children in London. It becomes apparent that many of those who claim to uphold the law - are the first one's to break it.

Those of you have watched the TV series London by Peter Ackroyd will have seen the life that London has pulsed with for most of its history. City of Vice takes you back to the darker side of that same London. You can't help but wonder how much of that darkness remains to the present day.

City of Vice. Its visually brilliant and so atmospheric that at points you could find yourself almost smelling the London air.

A fine romp!
This series based on the pre-police, The Bow Street runners is both a well acted and enjoyable romp through a squalid, filth infested London.
~The "forensics" of the time are a bit iffy, the acting hammy( you can tell Ian McDermid is having the time of his life) and the accents in some cases variable but strangely this adds to the enjoyment.
The series threatened to become repetitious, a failing of many series but thankfully did not. I gave it four stars because I felt the editing could be improved upon, I kept waiting for adverts to show up in some of the dramatic pauses.
Watch it for CSI back then value!

Realism in Costume Drama.
Thank goodness that AT LAST costume drama is getting away from the unwatchable, wimpish simpering-ness of the 'Catherine Cookson' type, and is being treated with proper seriousness and historical accuracy - yet as here, in City of Vice, still managing to enlighten us with a fantastic and atmospheric series of stories.
There still isn't enough 'intelligent' costume drama. The production budgets are usually so slim that production companies are compelled to thin it down to appeal to the largest - e.g. the 'Eastenders/Brookside' contingent - audience, whose idea of history and costume drama perhaps gets no further than 'Colin Firth, mob-caps, waistcoats-and-knotted-hankies'...
All we can do now is wait and hope there will be another series (or several) of this suberb City of Vice.