People who lived – and even some of those who died – in Grenfell Tower have their voices heard in this singular documentary featuring footage shot before the fire
Grenfell: The Untold Story (Channel 4) is a beautiful film about the most awful of subjects. The simple tragedy of 70 people dying in one night – two more thereafter – when a tower block caught fire is terrible enough. The story of how and why it became the inferno it did, capable of unleashing such devastation, is presented as one of such moral failure and ugliness that if you hadn’t witnessed it unfold you would half-believe it was a fable for our times.
But we did witness it. First in the headlines and the contemporary footage of the fire itself as – in the early hours of the morning of 14 June 2017 – it spread rapidly from a fridge in a fourth-floor flat up the outside of the recently refurbished 1970s block in west London. Then in the reports of the deaths – including 18 children, a quarter of all the young people who had lived in the tower. And then in the Grenfell inquiry, which confirmed that it was the exterior cladding, changed from the proposed type to a cheaper, more flammable kind that enabled the rapid spread of the flames and the production of toxic gases (which spread easily due to a lack of fire doors fit for purpose) – without which, one must presume, the death toll would have been lower.