Talent shines through in the BBC’s new heist drama, says Peter Fincham

Into the slot recently vacated by the universally admired Happy Valley has come another BBC crime drama The Gold, a retelling of the story of the 1983 Brinks-Mat robbery.

Brinks-Mat has proved just about as lucrative for programme makers as the gold was for the villains involved. They say that if you’ve bought any gold jewellery in the past 40 years you’re probably wearing Brinks-Mat. Similarly, when an anniversary is looming, TV commissioners can rarely resist recycling the base metal into another documentary or mini series – a quick look at Wikipedia will reveal that the “in popular culture” section is almost as long as the story of the robbery itself.

The Gold takes it further – a handsomely made six-parter starring one of TV’s hottest names, Jack Lowden. You might have seen Lowden recently seen in Apple TV’s spy thriller Slow Horses, where his character is a suave, well-mannered public schoolboy. Here he plays the violent and ruthless career criminal Kenneth Noye. Combine the best of both these performances and, some people are saying, you might just have the new James Bond.

Before I go further, spoiler alert – you may or may not have seen this whole series. This is a constant challenge these days around the water-cooler – what do we assume about people’s viewing habits? If you’re the sort of person who used to leaf through the Radio Times with a highlighting pen, you’re only halfway through The Gold. If you’re a creature of the 21st century you may already be trying to remember what happened. With Happy Valley, the BBC decided in a very Auntie-like way that we would have to wait until 9pm on Sunday for our next helping. With The Gold, and most other new series, they opt for what’s called a “day-one drop” – essentially an invitation to binge.

What we learn from watching The Gold is that stealing £26 million of pure gold is the easy bit: it’s getting rid of it that’s hard. So you need a fence – that’s Noye – and somebody who happens to have a smelting shed at the bottom of his garden – that’s John Palmer (played by Tom Cullen). In real life you wouldn’t ask either of these round to tea. Noye got a life sentence for the notorious Swanley road rage murder; Palmer was eventually shot dead by a person or persons unknown. In The Gold, they both have a certain charm and are surprisingly nice to their wives, but we’re never in any doubt that they are wrong ’uns.

Then there’s a character that Neil Forsyth – the series’ brilliant writer, also responsible for superb Scottish gangster drama Guilt – has invented, a creepy lawyer played by Dominic Cooper whose fictional name is Edwyn Cooper. Odd that – since he’s fictional, why give him the same surname? And odd at the end of the series (apologies if you’re not there) because alongside the usual captions summarising what happened to the main characters, there isn’t one for Cooper the lawyer. Because he didn’t exist.

But that’s dramatic licence for you, and I respect Neil Forsyth’s right to take liberties. If you want to watch a documentary about Brinks-Mat, take your pick.

There’s also sterling work from Charlotte Spencer as a sassy detective, Nicki Jennings, but the outstanding performance for my dodgy money is Hugh Bonneville as DCI Brian Boyce. Bonneville is a real revelation. We’re used to him playing in two keys – Ian Fletcher, the well-intentioned but dim-witted Director of Values in John Morton’s brilliant satire W1A; and the Earl of Grantham, the similarly well-intentioned and none-too-bright pater familias in Downton Abbey. The difference between the two is that in W1A Bonneville is hilarious whereas in Downton Abbey I can’t recall him ever being given a funny line, all the one-liners being contractually guaranteed to Maggie Smith.

Anyway, in The Gold he isn’t dim-witted in the least, or posh. He’s an old-school, salt-of-the-earth, by-the-book copper – and he dominates every scene he’s in. Most well-spoken actors like the opportunity to slip down the social scale, but they don’t always carry if off. (Readers with very long memories might recall the 1970s crime caper The Squeeze, in which Edward Fox played a cockney geezer seemingly based on Harry Enfield’s impersonation of Guy Ritchie.) Bonneville is pitch perfect from start to finish and if I were the producers, I would be busy developing a spin off series, DCI Boyce.

However familiar you might be with the story, The Gold is a hell of a yarn. I could maybe have done with a few less speeches about “Thatcher’s Britain” – nobody can resist a parable about Thatcher’s Britain! – but I was gripped throughout. And at the very end the producers neatly tee up a potential sequel. Further proof that Brinks-Mat, whether you’re trying to fill your coffers with gold or your Sunday night BBC One schedule, is the gift that never stops giving.

Peter Fincham is co-founder of Expectation TV. Previously he was Managing Director of Talkback, Controller of BBC One and Director of Television at ITV.

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