Tuesday, 19 September 2017

Missing But Not Forgotten: London's Burning

The Drama Channel have just started showing the long running ITV drama London's Burning.  It began in 1986 with a 2-hour (100 minute) pilot.  A series followed in 1988 and ran until 2002 clocking up 170 episodes.

The pilot contained a topless scene in which female firefighter Josie Ingham (Katharine Rogers) is sitting in a bath washing her husband Gerry's (Eric Deacon) hair while telling him about her new colleagues at the stationhouse to which she has just transferred.



Katharine Rogers' first appearance
Katherine Rogers was a main cast member for the first two series up to 1989 and then appeared in the first few episodes of series 3 before leaving the watch.  She made a couple of further guest appearances with the final of these being at the end of series 4.

The pilot is also packaged as a two-parter and the bath scene appears in the first part.

The drama channel are showing the episodes at 8am and 3pm each weekday and as seemed inevitable the scene did not survive.  There was a scene at a registry office wedding followed by a scene in a doctor's surgery - in the uncut version it occurs in between those two scenes.

The full version of the pilot is on YouTube split into multiple segments.  The missing scene can be seen in context at two minutes into part 5.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xIEtHg_LZk