Everything the BBC gets wrong about The Gold as the heist thriller returns

Telegraph

9 hours ago

When the first season of the Brink's-Mat heist thriller The Gold was broadcast in 2023, it depicted the true(ish) story of Britain's then largest ever heist in 1983, in which £26 million's worth of gold, diamonds and jewellery was stolen from Heathrow. The show ended with its lead villain Kenneth Noye convicted of conspiracy to handle stolen gold, but the realisation on the part of the police that they have only recovered half the treasure. A second series beckoned.
As the new season of The Gold begins, there is a new central antagonist, in the form of the jeweller and gold dealer John Palmer (Tom Cullen), who was acquitted of any involvement in the robbery and has now established himself as a respectable businessman, selling timeshares to British holidaymakers. However, it becomes clear that the gold has been smelted down and turned into cash and the police resume their cat-and-mouse hunt for the malefactors, set against an international backdrop.
The Gold's creator Neil Forsyth has always been upfront that the show has contained a generous helping of dramatic licence. Nonetheless, he has also suggested that 'the series is very much inspired by real events'. With this in mind – and given that many of the events throughout the second, and final, six-part instalment seem almost to defy belief – we delved into what's accurate historical recreation, and what's Forsyth's own invention. (Warning: comnt
Was the remaining Brink's-Mat gold really hidden in tin mines in Cornwall?
When it became clear that only half the Brink's-Mat gold had been recovered, excitable rumours began to spread about what had happened to the rest of it. It was suggested that it had been hidden everywhere from a builders' merchant in Hastings (which was excavated in 2001 after a tip-off) to, of all places, Bristol Rovers football ground. The fruitless search for it takes up a good proportion of the first episode of The Gold season two, as Boyce and his lieutenants are thwarted by the machinations of the various criminals, who duly melt down the gold and, with the connivance of crooked Hatton Garden jewellers, turn it into cash.
The second stash of gold was never discovered by the police (or anyone else), so whatever happened to it is the inevitable source of speculation. However, the show suggests that the remaining gold bullion was hidden in an abandoned Cornish tin mine. Forsyth comments,'That came from one article the researcher Adam Fenn and I found in the Evening Standard from the 1980s which we decided to explore in the opening of series two. It's very exciting for me knowing that that's never been dramatised before, and it became a key part of our opening episode.' It may or may not be true, but it's certainly original.
Is Tony Lundy a real person?
There are many new figures who appear on both sides of the law in The Gold, but perhaps the most interesting is police detective Tony Lundy, played by Stephen Campbell Moore. Lundy is portrayed as a brilliant but morally complicated detective chief inspector who refuses to follow the relatively straightforward path that Boyce and the others go down in order to pursue their investigation.
While many of the characters in the series are carefully drawn composites, Lundy is in fact a real detective superintendent. Long since retired, he's now resident in Spain: ironically, home to many of the villains that he spent his career attempting to put away. He retired in 1988 on the grounds of stress-induced ill-health, and continued to be a controversial figure for years afterwards. He was sufficiently well-known for the News of the World to publish an interview with him in 1994 entitled 'Bent or Brilliant?'
If The Gold suggests that he is the former, there's still enough of the night about him, in Campbell Moore's nuanced performance, to leave doubts in both his colleagues' and the audience's mind. As Campbell Moore says, 'We meet him when he's at the very end of his career, he's hit an absolute brick wall. Then he's given a chance and in a way it's his dream job… I think he felt that it was very unjust that he was being treated like this by the force that he had served for such a long time.'
Was the police enquiry really 'the longest and most expensive' in the Met's history?
One of the running themes during both series of The Gold is the Met's Assistant Commissioner Gordan Stewart (Peter Davison) complaining vociferously about the cost and man hours of the ongoing Brink's-Mat investigation.
In reality, the investigation did indeed drag on for decades. First, the police's search for the missing half of the gold was largely fruitless given that, as the show suggests, it was smelted down and reformed in untraceable fashion. Second, many of the villains involved in the heist absconded to countries that didn't have extradition treaties with Britain, including Spain – where the existing treaty expired in 1978, not to be renewed until 1985 – making attempts to remove or repatriate them nigh-on impossible. And finally, as with Lundy, there was the necessity of recruiting officers who not only had the skills needed but were also above suspicion. After all, there were considerable sums of illicit cash available for bribery purposes. Those recruited were generally ex-flying squad, an elite group of undercover officers hired both for their professionalism and ability to liaise with the criminal underworld without arousing suspicion.
In the series, although Stewart's apparent aversion to Boyce's investigation is played up for dramatic purposes, the investigation was a protracted and costly process that lasted until 2001 – and therefore took 18 years from the initial heist – that became about the principle of recovering the gold or money as much as anything else.
Who was John Palmer, really?
John Palmer, as played by Tom Cullen, was a supporting figure in the first series of the show, and most significant as the robber who got away. Palmer, a West Country jewellery and bullion dealer, was acquitted at the Old Bailey after successfully claiming that he was unaware that the gold he was handling was stolen. When the second season starts, Palmer is apparently a successful businessman, whose Tenerife timeshare activities mean that he is to be found on the Sunday Times Rich List next to the Queen: a source of grave embarrassment for the Met, who are determined to nail him for his illegal activities. He therefore becomes the principal antagonist of the show.
In reality, Palmer spent the 1990s a free man. In 1993, the High Court of Justice successfully applied for an injunction to freeze his assets, meaning that his extraordinary wealth (estimated at around £300 million at one point) could now be delved into more closely, and its origins properly analysed. Palmer, as The Gold suggests, remained a source of great interest for the international police, although his descent into cocaine-fuelled paranoia à la Henry Hill in Goodfellas is good old-fashioned dramatic invention, as are his suspiciously regular confrontations with Boyce.
The real-life Palmer was convicted of fraud in 2001. He spent the next decade in and out of jail for various convictions. He was shot to death in 2015; two years later, a man volunteered to be interviewed about the crime. No-one, though, has been convicted of the killing.
Is Douglas Baxter a real character?
The most entertaining character on screen in the second series of The Gold is Joshua McGuire's self-righteous but corrupt financial advisor Douglas 'Dougie' Baxter, who becomes involved with various money launderers out of a mixture of greed and desperation.
McGuire and Forsyth are having almost too much fun with Baxter, who keeps coming out with instantly quotable one-liners – 'I once asked for a Martini in a pub on the Isle of Man and the landlord came at me with a poker' – and if he really existed, he should be flattered (or horrified) by his presentation in the drama. In fact, Baxter is a composite, albeit all-too-believable, character: one link in the chain that is the international laundromat for dodgy cash. The presentation of the Isle of Man as a semi-corrupt tax haven where virtually every financial adviser is crooked may be broad, but the famously low-tax regime has certainly attracted some characters of dubious legality.
Can the police really use the money from drug busts?
When Stewart is moaning to Boyce about the costs of the investigation, the dogged detective suggests that, should the money be recovered from the criminals, it would then pass straight into the hands of the police force to offset the money spent on investigating them, as long as there might be some drug-related offence involved. Although this sounds like a particularly neat (or contrived) piece of dramatic invention, the Drug Trafficking Offences Act was a real piece of legislation that was introduced in 1986, as a result of Operation Julie: an attempt to recover the profits that were made from a major LSD-smuggling ring in the 1970s.
The act was later replaced by the 1994 Drug Trafficking Act, which broadened the scope to suggest that a confiscation order of a defendant's assets might be made if they were found guilty of having received 'payment or any other reward' from drug-related activities. Therefore, while the original Brink's-Mat robbery had nothing to do with narcotics, by the time that the considerable sums of money being involved were being used to finance and facilitate international drug deals, it had inadvertently played right into the Met's hands.
Did Kenneth Noye kill someone by accident in a road rage incident – or was it deliberate?
The surprise reappearance of Jack Lowden's Kenneth Noye in Tenerife at the end of the show's third episode, asking a reluctant Palmer for help, was revealed in the programme's trailers, as otherwise it might have been a genuinely surprising twist. By the time that he re-enters the second series, Noye has been released on licence after serving eight years of his fourteen-year sentence for conspiracy charges, and promptly goes on the run after murdering a 21-year old motorist, Stephen Cameron, in what was widely reported as a road rage incident.
The show implies that Noye had acted with deliberate intent. Noye, who is still alive – unlike many of the villains depicted in the show – was said to have been flattered by the casting of the charismatic Lowden in the first season; it will be interesting to see whether his reappearance leads to similar admiration.
Are 'supergrasses' a real phenomenon?
When the Comic Strip group released their comedy The Supergrass in 1985, in which a nobody boasts about being a successful drug smuggler and is mistaken for a police informant, the idea of the 'supergrass' was an unfamiliar one; so much so that they might have been believed to invent it.
The 'grass' – or informant – has been a well-known feature of the legal system since the late 1930s, when the word was used to describe a police stooge; the expression came from the term 'snake in the grass'. But the term 'supergrass' first emerged in the early 1970s to denote someone whose knowledge might be able to crack open and convict whole criminal networks.
But this idea was always more optimistic than anything else, and by around 1985, the term 'supergrass' had fallen into abeyance. The system was discontinued after a series of high-profile trials in Northern Ireland fell apart due to the 'bizarre, incredible and contradictory' statements of one such supergrass, and many of the informants' evidence was regarded as tainted.
By the time that the second series of The Gold begins in the early 1990s, supergrasses were largely obsolete (although they would, of course, give their name to the Britpop band). Therefore, the late introduction of an old-school villain (who shall remain nameless here) who is secretly working for the police is a surprising throwback, as is the revelation of which of the central characters has been in charge of them. This epitomises the tense, at times compromised relationship between the police and criminals – and the blurred lines between the two – which becomes such a central feature of The Gold.
The first season of the show was one of the most popular dramas on the BBC in the past few years, and there's no reason why the second instalment shouldn't recreate its success. But go in expecting dramatic invention, rather than documentary fact, and you won't be disappointed.