In November 1983, a gang of thieves broke into the Brink’s-Mat warehouse in a trading estate near Heathrow airport. There, they stumbled upon three tonnes of gold bullion, headed for Hong Kong. What they stole that day – £26m worth of the stuff – made it the most lucrative robbery in British criminal history and sparked a massive manhunt. That search, and the recovery of part of the laundered loot, constituted the first series of BBC One’s The Gold. The second series, out this week, asks a different question: what happened to the other – lost – half of the Brink’s-Mat haul?
Jewellery dealer John Palmer (Tom Cullen) might have been dubbed “Goldfinger” by the British press for his role in melting down the Brink’s-Mat takings, but he’s now living the high life, selling timeshares in Tenerife and appearing in the Sunday Times rich list. “Before you ask, I don’t know where the other half of the Brink’s-Mat gold is,” he tells punters searching for their Spanish holiday idyll. “But if you do find it, you’ll let me know, eh?” While Palmer’s lifestyle is catching the eye of the British police, one of the original gang, Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell), has left prison and started moving the missing bars. And here we enter the realm of writer Neil Forsyth’s imagination, as the corrupting tendrils of the gold spread out around the world. “Respect what the gold and the money does to people,” DCS Brian Boyce (Hugh Bonneville) warns his colleagues, as they prepare a last assault on the case.
Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first. Because The Gold actually is very good, both as a look at the operations of Britain’s criminal class in the pre-internet era, and an examination of enterprise and social mobility in the early days of Thatcherism. “I became a villain,” Miller says, “so that one day I wouldn’t have to be a villain any more.” It’s also a lot of fun, romping around the globe – from south London to the Caribbean, via the Canaries – like a barrow boy James Bond. The returning cast here – including Bonneville’s rather gormless Boyce, Cullen’s slippery Palmer, and Jack Lowden’s embittered dealer, Kenneth Noye – are convincingly fleshed out characters. This is not just a courtroom sketch; this is a full technicolour recreation.
Where the second instalment of The Gold struggles is when it reaches beyond the verifiable and into the speculative. What happened to the rest of the gold is the stuff of legend, but coming up with a mythology that matches the forensic nature of true crime is a tough ask. For this purpose, the show creates some cartoonish composite characters. “I warn you,” creepy money launderer Douglas Baxter (Joshua McGuire) informs Miller, “I am a Cambridge boxing half-blue.” He’s paired with another old establishment mucker, Logan Campbell, played as devilishly handsome and deeply insecure, by Tom Hughes. The broadness of the writing makes them less relatable than the likes of Palmer, Noye and ringleader Micky McAvoy (who is safely ensconced in prison). That tonal shift is matched by a narrative that postulates new ventures, including Bonneville donning a panama and heading out to Tenerife for what looks suspiciously like an audition for Death in Paradise.
Fundamentally, the move from factual drama into speculative fiction is a neat idea. After all, the curse of the Brink’s-Mat gold – the inevitable misfortune contact with it seems to bring – is legendary. “It’s Brink’s-Mat,” Boyce opines, gloomily. “It’s never over.” But the wash of creative licence and composite characters dulls the edge of this second instalment of The Gold, which might have been better off just focusing on the rise and fall of Palmer and Noye, men whose stories have all the drama of a great crime saga, just without any of the convenient structural neatness.
