CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Gold on BBC1: Gold, greed, booze... this caper has the hallmarks of a classic crime flick
Where would you hide £10 million in gold bars? You can't bury it in the back garden — that's the first place police will look.
Lock-up garages are too risky. Those places are apt to get burgled . . . the problem with being a big-time crook these days is that there are so many petty thieves.
I'd go for the Gothic option — an overgrown Victorian graveyard. Plenty of cities have them, with tombstones and cracked sarcophagi all at crazy angles, overgrown by ivy. Take a crowbar, prise a few open, and conceal the ingots with the coffins. Ingeniously creepy, don't you think?
Neil Forsyth, writer of The Gold, has a different theory for what happened to the missing half of the Brink's-Mat bullion.
As he told Nicole Lampert, in the Daily Mail's Weekend magazine, it's an idea that was floating around in the 1980s: one of the villains behind Britain's biggest heist simply hid his haul in a Cornish tin mine.
That's the basis for this comedy-thriller's second series. Good luck to anyone who hasn't seen the first run, aired in 2023, because many characters return with no introductions, including Hugh Bonneville as the luckless Met detective DCS Brian Boyce.
Hugh, doing a gruff South London accent, is never quite convincing playing a straight-as-a-die copper who aims to get results by twisting a few arms and wearing out a lot of shoe leather.
He lacks stolidness. There's always an edge of irony in his voice, a knowingness that doesn't fully match his character.
But he's on a losing wicket from the start, because all Forsyth's sympathies are with the robbers and their associates. The chief failing of the first series was its insistence on making them likeable, even lovable — when the truth is that men such as Kenneth Noye and John Palmer were obnoxious thugs.
Noye, played by Jack Lowden, hasn't returned yet, but Palmer (Tom Cullen) takes a central role. This time, at least, we can see what a vicious man he is — conning retirees into buying worthless timeshares in Tenerife, and lashing out with increasing violence as his paranoia grows.
The real entertainment comes from supporting roles, especially Joshua McGuire as a spitefully camp accountant who specialises in tax dodges, and Peter Davison as the wonderfully snobbish Met Commissioner. Stephen Campbell Moore is effortlessly watchable, too, as a bent copper who sees himself as the Lone Ranger.
Forsyth's reverence for classic gangland flicks shone through in a closing sequence of smelting gold, bundles of cash, boozing and greed, all set to a soundtrack of electronic music. It recalled one of the great crime movies, Thief, starring James Caan.
Sam Spruell plays Charlie Miller, the crafty wide boy who is landed with that tricky problem of stashing a ton-and-a-half of ingots somewhere safe. The Cornish mine is his masterplan.
Personally, I wouldn't risk it. The Famous Five are bound to stumble across it on a holiday adventure. 'I say, you fellows — look what Timmy's found!'
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