The Gold, series 2, review: bleaker, more desperate, but the show retains its sparkle

Telegraph

5 hours ago

The first series of The Gold (BBC One), a drama about the 1983 Brink's-Mat robbery, was an accomplished piece with one major flaw: a soft spot for its chief villain. Everyone likes a Robin Hood figure, but Kenneth Noye is a convicted murderer who also stabbed a police officer to death. This isn't loveable rogue territory. The second series wisely avoids doing the same thing again.
It differs in two ways. When Noye (Jack Lowden) eventually appears, he is now just a nasty piece of work. And the sequel is more interested in two other characters linked to the heist: John 'Goldfinger' Palmer and Charlie Miller. They're not exactly nice guys either, but they've got more nuance in storytelling terms.
Cast your mind back to the ending of series one, and one of the final shots was of Miller (Sam Spruell) sunning himself on the Costa Del Sol. He was revealed to be one of the armed robbers, and that tied in with Scotland Yard's realisation that they had only ever been on the trail of half of the Brink's-Mat gold. Now they're going after the other 50 per cent – all £13 million of it – and the drama explores various theories, which range from stashing it down a Cornish tin mine to laundering the money through a former public schoolboy based in the British Virgin Islands.
'A lot of blokes in South London become villains to be big men in South London. I became a villain to get out of South London. I became a villain so that one day I wouldn't have to be a villain any more,' says Miller, but his unsophisticated ways soon tell and he finds out that acquiring wealth and knowing what to do with it are two separate things. Meanwhile, Palmer (Tom Cullen) is sitting pretty on the Sunday Times Rich List thanks – on paper at least – to his dodgy timeshare business. Unfortunately for him, he's a magnet for trouble. With the chauffeur, private jet and champagne comes cocaine, Russian gangsters, and angry pensioners fleeced out of their life savings.
There are so many threads to the story, which freely admits to being based on theories rather than facts, and writer Neil Forsyth handles them with great skill.
While it may lack the narrative drive of series one, it will keep you watching through the strength of the writing and the top-notch performances from everyone involved – Bafta nominations for Cullen and Spruell would be well-deserved. If the scenes in Tortola begin to drag, they are pepped up by a great turn from Joshua McGuire as Douglas Baxter, a prissy, disgraced lawyer who brings a welcome note of comedy. There's also a great little cameo from Phil Davis as a crime boss hankering after the good old days.
The hunt for the gold is again led by Hugh Bonneville as Brian Boyce, the dogged detective who personifies everything that was good and proper about old-fashioned British policing. At the beginning, he's under pressure to wrap it up – this has been the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Met, and its failure has become an embarrassment. But Boyce presses on, aided by trusty colleagues Brightwell and Jennings (Charlotte Spencer and Emun Elliott) and new addition Tony Lundy (Stephen Campbell Moore).
It's no spoiler to say the police never did find the gold. But nobody got clean away. Where series one was full of verve, this series has a bleaker, more desperate tone. Pulling off the heist was all well and good. This follow-up is about the reality of being on the run, and it's not much fun.