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The BBC is making a three-part miniseries about London’s Grenfell Tower fire.
The fire, which led to the deaths of 72 residents and visitors, occurred on June 14, 2017.
The series will use the first-hand testimonies of survivors, family members and members of the emergency services, as well as evidence from the public inquiry to piece together the events that surrounded the disaster.
The BBC says the series will provide ‘a comprehensive account of the events leading up to, during, and after the devastating fire’.
It’s being written and directed by Peter Kosminsky. The BAFTA-winning filmmaker is best known for his unsparing treatment of controversial events. He directed ‘Shoot to Kill’, a docudrama about the RUC’s shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland, and ‘The Government Inspector’, about the mysterious death of bioweapons specialist David Kelly in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
‘Occasionally, events occur in our national story which touch us all,’ Kosminsky said in a statement. ‘The fire at Grenfell Tower is such an event. We remember what we were doing when we heard about it, remember the pictures, the saturation coverage.’
‘And yet, despite this, despite the many newspaper pages and TV hours devoted to the story, we may be left with a less-than-clear sense of exactly what happened, what went wrong.’
Along with associate producer Ahmed Peerbux, Kosminsky has conducted interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors of the blaze. He hopes the series will ‘reach the heart of this catastrophe’ to examine ‘how such a thing can have happened [and] how we can avoid it ever happening again’.
It’s not the first TV adaptation to tackle the disaster. In 2022, Channel 4 adapted ‘Grenfell: Value Engineering’ for the small screen, a stage play offering a devastating dramatisation of the inquiry into the fire. You can watch the TV serialisation here.
Hope after Grenfell: five Londons impacted by the fire share their stories.
Head here for more information on the Grenfell Fire Inquiry.