True story behind BBC crime drama that sent fans 'down a rabbit hole'
The second season of The Gold has once again brought the fallout of the Brink's-Mat heist to the forefront of BBC viewers' minds.
Who was involved? How did they get away with it? And whatever happened to the second half of the millions in gold bullion stolen from a security depot near London's Heathrow Airport early one morning in 1983?
The second season of the true crime drama moves the action on to the 1990s and expands beyond a London cops and robbers chase, to an investigation into a sprawling international network of criminality that touches the Canaries, the Caribbean and Asia.
The Gold has always been a blend of fact and fiction, but with season two the scales shifted. The fact is the second half of the gold, which Brian Boyce (Hugh Bonneville) and his Brink's-Mat taskforce are dead set on finding, was never recovered.
So, as the disclaimer at the start of the season suggests, the BBC drama had to add a touch of filmmaking magic to the story. The title card says the season is 'inspired by some of the theories around what happened to the other half'.
That's not to say everything here has been conjured up from thin air. Several of the key players are still based on real life figures.
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It's that blend of fact and invention that has prompted several BBC viewers to seek out the truth of what happened after the robbery. @fordazzling wrote on X: 'Just finished binge watching series 2 and now cannot sleep as I'm down a Brink's-Mat rabbit hole of 'where are they now?' #TheGold.'
So here's what we know…
In short, yes-ish. The Brink's-Mat heist itself is a stone cold fact. Six armed men broke into the Brink's-Mat security depot, hoping for a sweet £1 million payday, but instead took home a bounty of gold bullion worth £26m.
It was described as 'the crime of the century' and essentially rewrote the rules of international money laundering, leading to a boom in development around the London Docklands.
Yet The Gold freely admits it doesn't know the full truth of what happened after the high-stakes theft itself, so the show is a combination of real events and theories on where the loot might have ended up.
As for the characters, some are real, some are invented and some are a fun mismash of several different real people. John Palmer really did set up a timeshare business in the Canary Islands. But Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell) who made off with the second half of the gold isn't a real historical figure in the Brink's-Mat tale.
Instead, he's a composite character, made up of various south London villains, as is his frenemy money laundering whizz Douglas Baxter (Joshua McGuire).
Spruell described it in an interview as being 'not based on real, but based on an amalgam of real', telling the Radio Times: 'Neil [Forsyth]'s research has been extensive, as with all his projects and he has found his dramatic characters in the research.
'Partly it draws on real-life events, or real-life people, but in the end, it's his imagination that shapes the final product.'
After extensive research, the show's writer Neil Forsyth has said that his biggest challenge in shaping that story was deciding what to keep from the story – with certain elements on the cutting room floor as a result.
He told BBC Radio Scotland: 'It was such a fun story to research. It was more about piecing it together and it was really quite exciting.
'There's some great breakthroughs in the research. You think, 'well, I'll have that'. And it's exciting to think, 'I don't think anyone knows about this'.'
He continued: 'The other interesting thing was, we did so much research on this that Brian Boyce, who Hugh Bonneville plays, who's the real life detective in charge of investigation – I'm at a stage now where sometimes I'll tell him things about the case that he didn't know, and that's always a bit of a thrill.'
Heading up the Brink's-Mat team was Brian Boyce, played by Hugh Bonneville. The Downton Abbey star managed to get to know the real-life police detective to play him on screen.
He told a Royal Television Society panel that if you cut Boyce in half, it would read 'police' and 'doing the right thing' all the way through him.
'He was incorruptible,' said Bonneville, 'which is why, at one stage in his career, MI5 suggested him for someone who wanted a certain investigation done because he, unlike certain others in the Metropolitan police and other police forces, had not been got at by money.
'He was absolutely a man of principle, and integrity.'
Boyce is joined on the taskforce by Nicki Jennings (Charlotte Spencer), who is a fictional copper and Tony Brightwell (Emun Elliott) who is based on a real officer.
Brightwell eventually left the police for the private sector, working for security firms such as Bishop Investigations and ISC Global. He's now in his 70s.
Most of the gold has never been recovered.
Uniting blue and white-collar criminals, the robbery was so far-reaching, the gang had to bring many others on board to figure out what to do with the loot.
While the network of those involved is incredibly complicated, even more so with the so-called curse that left several of those involved killed, the gang was headed by Brian Robinson and Mickey McAvoy.
Robinson was jailed for 25 years for his role in the robbery, as was McAvoy. More Trending
Then in 1995, the High Court ordered McAvoy to make a payment of £27,488,299, making him responsible for the entire sum stolen, however by that point most of his share was apparently long gone.
He was released from prison in 2000.
A version of this article was first published in February 2023.
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The Gold continues tonight at 9pm on BBC One and iPlayer.
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