City of Vice

City of Vice is a British historical crime drama television series set in Georgian London and was first screened on 14 January 2008 on Channel 4. It is produced by Touchpaper Television part of the RDF Media Group. The series mixes fiction with fact following the fortunes of the famous novelist Henry Fielding (Ian McDiarmid) and his brother John (Iain Glen). Henry and John Fielding were magistrates of Westminster and the men who created the modern police force in Britain through the Bow Street Runners. The series was written by Clive Bradley and Peter Harness, whose scripts were nominated for a Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Series, 2008. It was directed by Justin Hardy and Dan Reed. The historical consultant was Hallie Rubenhold.

The show uses authentic historical research to tell the story of the two men battling to create a police force, 75 years before Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police. Henry Fielding’s memoirs and contemporary sources such as the Old Bailey Sessions Papers have been used to provide historical accuracy to the series.

The series uses innovative mapping sequences to follow the narrative and characters' progress, wherein John Rocque's map of 1746 is seen from above, becomes firstly 3D and ultimately merges with film sequences of the next scene to pick up the narrative tale.

The series won the Royal Television Society Judges' Award, 2008.

Read more about City Of Vice:  Episodes, Reception, DVD Release, Bow Street Runner – The Game

Famous quotes containing the words city of, city and/or vice:

    “Notice how he has numbered the blue veins
    in my breast. Moreover there are ten freckles.
    Now he goes left. Now he goes right.
    He is building a city, a city of flesh.
    He’s an industrialist.”
    —Anne Sexton (1928–1974)

    “A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.”
    —Margaret Mead (1901–1978)

    “And they lie like wedges,
    Thick end to thin end and thin end to thick end,
    And are a figure of the way the strong
    Of mind and strong of arm should fit together,
    One thick where one is thin and vice versa.”
    —Robert Frost (1874–1963)