How do you tell the story of a heist, when the heist isn’t the story? In 1983, six masked burglars broke into a warehouse on a trading estate near Heathrow. They were looking to crack into a vault, but when the security guards failed to provide a passcode – even when doused in petrol and threatened with a naked flame – attention turned to the glistening stash outside the vault. And this is where the story of The Gold, BBC One’s new six-part retelling of the Brink’s-Mat robbery, begins. This isn’t the story of a heist, but of what happened next.
“How do you shift three tonnes of gold?” asks Charlotte Spencer’s Rotherhithe local copper, Nicki. “Slowly,” replies her partner Tony (Emun Elliott). There are other adverbs he might have chosen: agonisingly, complicatedly, infuriatingly. Instead of the expected million quid in the vault, the team of low-level crooks have stumbled upon gold bullion worth some £26m. The job of getting the stolen gold back into the market falls to Kenneth Noye (Slow Horses’ Jack Lowden), a charming but dangerous fence, who seizes the haul as the police net closes on the perpetrators. “Gold like that,” he tells ringleader Mickey (Adam Nagaitis). “You can’t control it.” And so it proves.
