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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Rebecca Nicholson

The Gold season two review – this thrilling tale of stolen millions is top quality British drama

Shirley and John Palmer look concerned in Gold.
All that glisters … Shirley (Beth Goddard) and charming rogue John Palmer (Tom Cullen) in Gold. Photograph: BBC/Tannadice Pictures/Cristina Ríos Bordón

At the end of the first series of The Gold, it dawned on the officers of the Met’s Flying Squad that for all of their multiple investigations into the infamous Brink’s-Mat robbery of 1983, they had only ever been chasing half of the stolen bullion. Arriving two years after its highly entertaining predecessor, series two sets off with an irresistible premise: what exactly happened to the rest of it?

The trouble is that the show doesn’t know the answer, though it freely admits this. None of the gold has ever been recovered, but a note at the beginning explains that the series is based on both real events and theories as to where the loot went. As before, some of the characters are real and some invented. The focus, this time, is on bringing down the ones who got away. The police are hot on the heels of the charming rogue John Palmer (Tom Cullen), AKA “Goldfinger”, who talked his way out of a conviction so convincingly in series one. They’re also trying to track down Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell), a fictional amalgam of various south London villains, who has come away from the robbery with a lot of gold to hide and only loose ideas of what to do with it.

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