The Gold loses its shine

New Statesman​

a day ago

Photo by BBC / Tannadice Pictures
The BBC's second series of its crime drama The Gold, about the 1983 Brink's-Mat heist, picks up where things left off: about half the loot that the robbers stole from a security depot near Heathrow remains unaccounted for. The gold – worth over £110m in today's money – turned out to be rather more than the six lads could handle, and in the first series they all (more or less) ended up paying for their greed. The show's creator, Neil Forsyth, took a calculated risk in choosing to concentrate on the robbery's aftermath, rather than the theft itself – which was dealt with in about five propulsive minutes. Instead, he homed in on the gangsters' increasingly convoluted attempts to convert the bars into the lavish lives they'd always dreamed of.
This time round, the investigation is being led again by DCI Boyce (a sturdy but rather dull Hugh Bonneville), with help from perky DIs Jennings (Charlotte Spencer) and Brightwell (Emun Elliott), plus a new addition, DI Lundy (a classy Stephen Campbell Moore). In the last series, Boyce was sceptical of the talents of his underlings but came round; now, they get along famously. Still, the investigation is under threat from paper-pushers higher up, who feel it's dragging on too long, costing too much and failing to produce any wins that can be published in the newspapers.
Amid a few irritating tics is the series' insistent use of the word 'villain'. Do criminals really self-identify as villains, as they do here? Do coppers chasing such villains also refer to them as villains? It seems unlikely, but they do here, over and over.
On that note, the villains in our sights are John Palmer (Tom Cullen), a gold-dealer-turned-fraudster living it large in Tenerife, and Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell), a run-of-the-mill crook who, unlike Palmer, isn't a real person but an amalgam of various people. Also in play, most enjoyably, is disgraced lawyer Douglas Baxter, a fictional character played with delicious waspishness by Joshua McGuire.
Baxter has been struck off, we learn, after being caught taking cocaine at a steakhouse, and he is soon persuaded by Miller to start laundering huge wodges of cash for him. More than any other character, Baxter feels decidedly imaginary: he is, he believes, one of the finest legal minds of his generation; aged eight, he was accepted into Mensa. It's hard to believe such a clever-clogs would ever consort with a low-life so obviously doomed as Miller – but Baxter is excellent company, so his lack of credibility is quickly forgiven.
The series is, like its predecessor, easy on the eye, with an invigorating soundtrack and solid performances. But the script tends towards the grandiose (DCI Boyce loves a little speech), and as the action flits between London, the Caribbean, the Isle of Man, Cornwall and Tenerife, it can be hard to follow. When a bunch of dead-eyed Russians turn up in Tenerife, wanting their money laundered too, you just want them to go away and stop complicating things.
After being criticised for presenting gangsters with a rosy tint in the first series, particularly the robber and killer Kenneth Noye (played with dash by Slow Horses'Jack Lowden), the second series tries to darken Noye's portrayal. In the first, Lowden's Noye was a Robin Hood type inclined to see his trade in class terms: 'That's how England works,' he remarked at one point. 'That lot have it and us lot nick it.' Noye's killing of a police officer was covered but felt random and underpowered, and the series didn't go up to 1996, when he murdered a 21-year-old on an M25 slip road. Even so, Palmer comes across as rather appealing: a 'villain', to be sure, but a warm and handsome one, who bids his colleagues goodbye at the end of the working day, loves his kids and gives his wife thoughtful presents.
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Forsyth has confirmed that there will not be a third series, and the Brink's-Mat lemon does feel sucked dry by the end of this one. Still, taken together, both series are a real achievement: not particularly innovative television, but dependable and made with palpable craft and commitment.
The Gold
BBC One
[See also: The People's Republic of iPhone]
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