What lies beyond Happy Valley? Nothing but an aching gap on Sunday nights looms – in February! Well, don’t despair because there’s a treat coming up on its tail. The Gold is a real audience-pleaser, a classic, classy British crime drama with a big and brilliant cast.
It’s based on the largest heist in world history, the Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow airport in 1983, in which a team of six armed robbers attempted to steal £1 million in foreign currency and ended up coming away with £26 million in gold bullion. Oops!
And this is just the start of The Gold, a new six parter by Neil Forsyth, the creator of the excellent black comedy Guilt, now given room to really spread his wings on prime time BBC One. This story is a perfect vehicle for the writer’s talents, with razor-sharp one-liners and a fresh take on noir characters.
It also provides the vast cast with plenty of fun and we have the pleasure of watching habitual leads like Hugh Bonneville (as DCI Bryce, who sets up a special task force to investigate) and Dominic Cooper, rubbing up against some of the finest character actors around, such as Adam ‘The Terror’ Nagaitis (who plays Micky, the heist leader) and Sean ‘Mission: Impossible – Fallout’ Harris, to name just two of many.
This is not merely an action heist series though; it’s about what happens after the robbery – like, how do you steal that amount of bullion and then actually sell it back into the system? This is the problem facing perhaps the stand-out performer here, Jack Lowden, as the fence who sees his chance at fortune and glory; the chance to be “king”.
The Dunkirk and Slow Horses actor here really shows off his talents as the kind of appealingly hard-nosed, high life-loving criminal that brings to mind both Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast and Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday.
Indeed, the triumph of Forsyth and director Aniel Karia (who directed and won an Oscar for The Long Goodbye with Riz Ahmed) is that they evade the cringey, sub-Tarantino Guy Ritchie-isms that infect so much British crime drama, instead achieving a smarter, more classic feel.
As the series goes on it promises also to unveil the way that dirty money fueled the London Docklands property boom, and the birth of global money-laundering. Seems like with Happy Valley gone, there’s still gold in them BBC hills.
