New BBC drama, The Gold fills the 9pm Sunday evening slot left vacant by the highly anticipated Happy Valley finale and starts its run on Sunday, February 12. The drama is inspired by the true story of the 1983 Brink's-Mat robbery when burglars got more than they planned for at the security depot near Heathrow Airport.
The six-part drama stars Downton Abbey's Hugh Bonneville, Dominic Cooper from Marvel's Captain America and Mamma Mia, Jack Lowden of Slow Horses and Sanditon's Charlotte Spencer.
Inspired by extensive research and interviews with some of those involved in the events, The Gold is a pulsating dramatisation which takes a journey into a 1980s world awash with cheap money and loosened morals to tell this extraordinary and epic story for the first time in its entirety.
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What happened at Brink's-Mat?
On November 26 1983, six armed men broke into the Brink’s-Mat security depot near London’s Heathrow Airport, and inadvertently stumbled across gold bullion worth £26m. What started as 'a typical Old Kent Road armed robbery' according to detectives at the time, became a seminal event in British criminal history, remarkable not only for the scale of the theft, at the time the biggest in world history, but for its wider legacy.
The disposal of the bullion led to a vast international money laundering operation, provided the dirty money that helped fuel the London Docklands property boom, united blue and white-collar criminals and left controversy and murder in its wake.
On that day in 1983, half a dozen armed men surprised staff as they started their early shift at the warehouse. One of the security guards, Anthony Black, was in on the robbery and helped the gang gain entry. Staff were handcuffed and threatened unless the combination to the safe was given.
When they opened it, the shocked gang found gold, cash and diamonds.
One of the thieves, Brian Robinson, was caught after his brother-in-law, Anthony Black, gave coppers his name. But four out of the six men were never caught.
Notorious criminal at the time, Kenneth Noye, was called in to help the robbers turn the gold into cash. He was imprisoned for helping to launder some of the cash, and despite killing an undercover detective he escaped a murder conviction for that, pleading self defence. However, he was convicted of murdering a man on the M25 in a road rage incident.
Also, a man known as “Mad” Mickey McAvoy was jailed for 25 years for his part in the raid in 1995 a court ordered him to make a payment of £27,488,299, making him responsible for the entire sum stolen. He and Robinson are the only two robbers convicted for the heist itself. They have both died in the past two years.
Much of the gold itself was never recovered and the very start of the BBC show a statement reads: "“If you have bought gold jewellery in Britain since 1984, it is likely to contain traces of the Brink’s-Mat gold.” It's also reported that the money from the heist was the driving force behind the London Docklands developments.
The Gold airs from Sunday 12 February at 9pm on BBC One and iPlayer with all episodes available as a boxset on iPlayer from launch. For more showbiz and television stories get our newsletter here.
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