The first series of The Gold in 2023 was received rapturously, though apparently it only told one half of the story of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow airport. Now screenwriter Neil Forsyth has returned to the scene of the crime to reveal what happened – or might have happened, since there’s a fair bit of artistic licence at play here – to the missing portion of the £26 million quid’s worth of stolen gold.
Though this time around we no longer have the likes of Sean Harris and Dominic Cooper in the cast, there are still plenty of sharply-drawn characters to savour. There is, for instance, Sam Spruell’s raw and gravelly performance as Charlie Miller, who seeks out Danny Abbott (Dickie Beau) in the wilds of Cornwall to help him bury his glittering stack of loot in a derelict tin mine. Old-school Charlie also finds himself having to deal with bent, slimy lawyer Douglas Baxter (Joshua McGuire, pictured below), who sets about laundering Charlie’s gold bullion into wads of banknotes.
As in series one, Forsyth’s scripts are fond of stressing the theme of class resentment, and if Miller is South London Man writ large – Sam Spruell, as it happens, is from Southwark – Baxter is an outrageous confection of social-climbing pretension and hysterical self-aggrandisement. Domiciled in the Isle of Man, where he’s fond of creating tax-dodging start-up companies, Baxter is apt to fly into a rage when he’s denied entry to the executive lounge at the island’s tiny airport, and is farcically addicted to puffing himself up into a big balloon of ludicrousness. For instance, he mocks an imagined eight-year-old Miller as undertaking “a bit of light pick-pocketing, then home for jellied eels and a knees-up round the old joanna”. As for Baxter himself, on the other hand, “when I was eight years old I was accepted into MENSA … I am highly intelligent.”
You might think trusting such an imbecile with your ill-gotten gains would be tantamount to putting a noose round your own neck (and indeed the plethora Isle of Man-registered companies will be a critical clue), but a stressed-out villain may find himself short of options when the Old Bill is bearing down on him. And the law comes galloping into view in the shape, once again, of Hugh Bonneville’s DCS Brian Boyce, still doggedly trying to winkle out more facts about the Brink’s-Mat case even though his bosses at the Met are keen to call it quits and stop funding the investigation.
Boyce manages to persuade them otherwise, which is lucky because otherwise we wouldn’t have a series two, and we find the investigation spreading its wings to Spain’s Costa Blanca and the island of Tenerife. In the latter, the wily John Palmer – “I’m just a jeweller from Solihull” – has ploughed his winnings into a lucrative racket selling time-shares to unsuspecting retirees from Blighty. Tom Cullen plays Palmer with a carefully-crafted mix of blarneying, superficial charm and a mounting sense of desperation as tiny cracks keep appearing in his cover story. He’s wealthy enough to buy his wife Marnie (Stefanie Martini, pictured below with Cullen) half a dozen race horses, but when a team of Russian gangsters appears in his office and tells him they want to buy his business, Palmer can hardly help experiencing a sense of creeping unease.
Adding further layers to the narrative are Stephen Campbell Moore’s deliciously seedy portrayal of dog-eared detective Tony Lundy, and Tom Hughes as Logan Campbell, a posh public schoolboy neck-deep in global money-laundering from his base in Tortola. It’s Campbell who has a scene where he defines himself, Baxter and Miller as “boarding school, grammar school, borstal”. It’s glib, but a succinct indicator of the social layers that The Gold has set out to portray.
- Begins on BBC One on 8 June. All episodes available on BBC iPlayer.
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