Latest news with #BrinksMat
The Sun
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Sun
I've seen true face of killer Kenneth Noye… he's a ruthless thug who sent me a chilling threat & The Gold is a whitewash
TO viewers of the hit TV drama The Gold, he comes across as a loveable rogue who helped launder the bullion stolen in one of the UK's most infamous heists. And Kenny Noye would like the world to believe he is a changed man - but I know otherwise. 12 The BBC series centres on the 1983 Brinks-Mat robbery, near Heathrow, and the network which handled the £26million of gold bullion stolen, led by Noye. I've been asked many times who the real Kenneth Noye is - especially following the 'kindly' portrayal of him by well-spoken public schoolboy actor Jack Lowden in the drama. Well, I've penned three bestselling true crime books about Britain's most notorious criminal and his associates - and I have little doubt he's one of the most ruthless villains this country has ever seen. In fact, I've even been on the receiving end of a chilling threat from Noye himself. Yet today, this convicted killer is flirting with fame and The Gold has become the latest chapter in his alleged rehabilitation programme. He's turning into a celebrity criminal, which must be devastating for so many of his victims and their families. As police hunted down the missing millions, Noye killed undercover cop John Fordham in the garden of his Kent mansion in 1985 - although he was acquitted of murder after claiming he believed the police officer was a hitman. He was later jailed for the brutal road rage murder of innocent motorist Stephen Cameron, 21, in 1996. But following Noye's 2019 release from prison, he launched his own one-man public relations campaign, which has included a series of carefully orchestrated public appearances. This once self-styled invisible man of the underworld turned up at a VIP night out at an Elvis tribute concert with soap star Jessie Wallace. Then he attended an art gallery which featured a portrait of him perched atop a pile of gold bars. And he even 'unofficially' co-operated with a well known TV documentary -maker for a crime series, as well as contributing to a true crime biography about him. Kenneth Noye speaks on camera for first time since being freed from jail 12 Yet only a few years earlier - while serving the life sentence for the murder of Stephen Cameron – Noye had scribbled out a threatening note inside a book I'd written about him, which was passed to me by a concerned prison officer. In it, Noye had written: 'I'm certainly no killer. Wensley Clarkson has published loads of lies about me in his books and caused untold damage. The tables will turn one day. "All the very best - Ken Noye.' Framed claims Noye was sentenced to life in 2000 for the murder of Stephen Cameron - who he stabbed to death on a motorway slip road in Swanley, Kent. For more than thirty years, Noye had insisted that 'the cozzers' had fitted him up for both the killings he'd committed because of his links to the Brinks-Mat gold. Yet having threatened me and insisted he'd killed no one, Noye - the convicted murderer - convinced the parole board he was a changed man. And in 2019, he was released for 'good behaviour'. By all accounts, Kenneth Noye worked as hard to earn that parole as he did turning the gold bullion from the Brinks-Mat robbery into cash - the crime that first catapulted him to underworld infamy. The real Noye is a workaholic criminal who goes after anyone who crosses him, including the innocent road rage victim. One old school villain I know recently tried to convince me Noye was a changed man after months of therapy in prison, which had helped convince the parole board to release him after he'd served a 16-year minimum tariff sentence. But it seems more likely that slippery Noye used therapy as a passport to freedom because he's clearly not one to dwell on the past. It is said that the makers of The Gold were so worried about Noye suing them, it's alleged they persuaded him to sign off on a sanitised version of himself, which left numerous unanswered questions about that road rage killing and Noye's time on the run in Spain. Typical Kenny Noye. Always in control. Lion 'guard' at home When Noye and gold smelter John 'Goldfinger' Palmer were turning that stolen bullion into cash, following the Brink's-Mat robbery, he was smart enough to join the Freemasons after being nominated by a friendly police officer. This enabled him to stay one step ahead of Kent Police, where several officers were believed to be masons. In the days, weeks and months after the robbery, Noye emerged as the ultimate criminal fixer. He'd even hidden some of the gold in a pit he dug at the end of his garden 'for a rainy day'. Later, Noye told one veteran detective I know that he presumed no one would dare come looking for that gold because he kept a lion prowling freely around the grounds of his home. Noye's neighbours had heard numerous stories about the lion but none of them were brave (or stupid) enough to tell the police anything about it. 12 Meanwhile country gent Kenneth Noye donated handfuls of cash to local charities and even held a couple of fetes in the grounds of his immaculate mansion. And when he finally got nicked for handling the gold, he tried to bribe decent, honest Brink's-Mat chief investigator Brian Boyce - portrayed so well by Hugh Bonneville in The Gold – with a Freemason handshake and a million pounds. Noye always claimed back then that he hated the notoriety that came with the Brink's-Mat gold. Yet while on the run in Spain - where he fled after the fatal road rage attack - he kept a copy of my first book about him, Public Enemy Number One, on the passenger seat at all time and would show it off to anyone travelling in his car. When Noye was first released from prison back in 2019, I resisted the temptation to drag his name back into the limelight, despite the public uproar from many who continued to see him as Public Enemy Number One and felt he should never have been let out of jail. But then one old lag I know told me he'd seen a photo of 'reformed criminal' Noye taken in a bar in his beloved Kent a couple of years after his release. Either side of him were two of the region's most notorious drug lords. Noye was no different from the ruthless, criminal mastermind who'd been found not guilty of murdering policeman John Fordham in the garden of his Kent mansion, after claiming he acted in self-defence. I once asked an associate of his if Noye had ever talked about what had happened the night the undercover officer died. 'Kenny just said it was kill or be killed,' said his associate. 'He got away with that one, but it was only going to be a matter of time before he'd lose it again.' That happened on the M25 where Noye ended up murdering Stephen Cameron in the heart of the criminal's home county of Kent. 12 Stephen's heartbroken family and 17-year-old Danielle Cable - who saw her fiancé knifed to death on an intersection - have never fully recovered from what Noye did that day. They suffered so much heartbreak that Stephen's 75-year-old father Kenneth killed himself in 2022. The family must have been stunned the following year when Noye issued a public apology to them and Danielle, insisting she was 'safe' from any reprisals. He even denied allegations made by detectives that he'd paid a hitman to kill Danielle when he was on the run in Spain. And now The Gold has once again obliged them to re-live it all over again. Whatever the truth of about the current status of Kenneth Noye, no doubt this won't be the last we will be hearing from him.
Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE The new gold rush: Why more of Britain's criminal gangs are using the precious metal to hide their dirty money as black market gold trade booms
It was the biggest gold robbery of all time, with £26million of bullion, diamonds and cash stolen from a Brink's-Mat warehouse near Heathrow. BBC drama The Gold - which returns to our screens this week - tells the story of the 1983 heist and its bloody aftermath, which continues to fascinate Brits more than 40 years later. But today's gangs aren't only interested in stealing gold, they are buying it too - with dirty cash used to purchase secret stashes that can be hidden in lock-ups or buried under gardens. One Essex drug dealer was caught with £24,000 worth of solid gold coins tucked away in a safe. Another used some of the £100,000 proceeds from a Birmingham county lines operation to acquire a collection of 100g bars. While this might seem like an old-fashioned way of going about things, it's partly a response to very modern pressures, with the rise in digital payments making piles of banknotes something of a hot potato for criminals. Surging gold prices are also making this approach more attractive, given buried bullion is likely to be worth significantly more when it's dug back up again several years in the future. When it comes to organised crime, gold is as big in the age of Bitcoin and online banking as it ever was... Organised crime expert Gary Carroll, who has appeared as an expert witness in numerous drug-related cases involving gold, describes the metal as 'incredibly useful' to criminals. 'Gold lets criminals reduce £10,000 of drug money into an object they can fit in the palm of their hand,' he told MailOnline. 'In my experience, it's often buried in back gardens or hidden many miles away. 'The other benefit is gold tends to appreciate in value. So not only are you able to hide cash wealth, you're able to make money while doing so. 'This doesn't usually involve massive bars, what I tend to see are ones weighing half an ounce, an ounce or 28 grams. So they are still worth a large amount of money but are very small.' Some of this gold is bought on the black market, but it can also be purchased from legitimate sellers. While sellers of investment gold have a legal obligation to ensure they sell only to identifiable, legitimate clients, ID is not always requested for small purchases. Mr Carroll, who runs the consultancy Claymore Advisory Group, believes social changes are one factor driving gold purchases among Britain's criminals. 'Going back 15 years ago we were much more of a cash-led society, which made it easier to launder money through shops, garages and taxi firms, or simply spend it in large amounts,' he said. 'Going cashless does create a problem. To me or you having £50,000 in cash hidden under your bed is nice, but for a drug dealer it's problematic. 'It's hard to spend it - many car dealers won't let you buy cars with cash any more and anti-money laundering legislation is in full swing. 'So changing it from one form of currency to another - gold - is beneficial. You can then sit on it for weeks, months or years before converting it into money or trading it on the hand-to-hand gold market with a slightly bent jeweller.' Francis Lagonski, a 23-year-old drug dealer, was found with £24,000 worth of solid gold coins in a safe at his home in Braintree, Essex, when it was raided as part of a drugs investigation. In a sign Lagonski was no Luddite, officers also seized digital assets - including cryptocurrency - worth an estimated £100,000. Police described the haul as evidence the dealer was 'laundering his criminal gains as he went' and he was handed a six-year jail term for two counts of money laundering and conspiracy to supply drugs. Mr Carroll was an expert witness in the trial of the gang behind the 'KD' county line run by Ahmed Kadoora, which supplied at least 5kg of cocaine and heroin on the streets of Birmingham and Worcester. Leeds Crown Court heard money was counted at an opulent London office (pictured) belonging to the socialite James Stunt. But he was cleared of all charges by a jury A jury heard how one member of the conspiracy, Khalid Alabdullah, converted some of the gang's £100,000 revenues into gold bars. 'The bars weighed just 100g,' said Mr Carroll. 'Given they are so small you can see the attraction in terms of disguising them. 'Gold is a transferrable, tangible, valuable commodity that if managed correctly doesn't need to have any actual link to the owner. 'Then, unlike other assets like cryptocurrency or cars, a piece of gold can be passed from person to person with no record.' In addition to criminals buying small amounts of gold for their own use are specialised money launderers who process dirty cash generated by criminal clients. One gang, who operated through a business in Bradford, were convicted earlier this year in what is believed to be the biggest money laundering prosecution in UK history. Banknotes were brought in bags and holdalls to Fowler Oldfield, a jewellery company, before being turned into gold grain, which is untraceable and easier to conceal than bullion. Much of this gold is then believed to have been taken out of the UK. Gregory Frankel, 47, Daniel Rawson, 47, Haroon Rashid, 54, and Arjun Babber, 32, were jailed for a combined total of 43 years for laundering £266 million. Socialite James Stunt, the former son-in-law of Formula 1 tycoon Bernie Ecclestone, was charged over the scheme but walked free from Leeds Crown Court after being cleared. As this case indicates, the link between gold and organised crime stretches far beyond Britain's borders. In fact, the United Nations is now so concerned about the role of gangs in the international trade in bullion that it considers the issue a 'serious global threat'. One major problem is criminals taking over mines and refineries in South America and Africa. The product of this illicit trade is often termed 'blood gold' due to the exploitation usually involved. And while the murky nature of the international metals market makes it difficult to say for sure, experts believe some may be ending up in Britain. Ahmed Soliman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Africa Programme at Chatham House who has studied illegal gold mining. He said armed groups and cartels often set up mines in 'ungoverned spaces' inside conflict zones before using the proceeds to enrich themselves or buy weapons. The bullion stolen in the Brink's-Mat robbery was melted down by John Palmer, who like the rest of the gang was a violent career criminal. It was then recast and combined with copper to disguise it, before being sent around the world. Most of the haul - worth around £111million today - was never recovered. Mr Soliman said modern criminals frequently melt down or rebrand illicit gold to hide its origin. 'With other minerals like blood diamonds they are more traceable but the same doesn't really exist for gold - it's very highly mobile and can be moved across borders and melted with new stamps put on,' he said. 'The majority of gold coming from Sudan and the African continent goes to the United Arab Emirates, either directly or indirectly.' The researcher believes it as 'very much a possibility' that some of this gold may end up in the UK, but says it is 'difficult to know for sure'. What everyone agrees on is that gold continues to play a role in organised crime just like it did in the days of the Brink's-Mat robbers. And given its numerous attractions to criminals looking to stay one step ahead of the law, there's no sign of that changing any time soon.
BBC News
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Turning the Brink's-Mat heist into dramatic gold
How do you tell a story involving dozens of people and an international conspiracy in just 12 episodes?That was the challenge writer Neil Forsyth faced when adapting the story of the Brink's-Mat heist - one of Britain's biggest robberies when £26 million worth of gold, diamonds and cash was 26 November 1983, a group of men dressed in security uniforms broke into a warehouse just outside of London's Heathrow Airport, hoping to find large sums of foreign currency. Instead, they found 6,800 gold sees Brink's-Mat as "the peak of traditional British crime - a bunch of South London robbers pulling off the biggest heist in [British] history.""Equally, it was the end of an era. The original robbers lacked the means to manage the proceeds, so a new breed of criminals took over" - those who could turn stolen cash into "vast criminal enterprises."The story of the aftermath, along with a few theories, is told in the second series of The Gold, airing now on BBC One and the writer and actors in the series speak about what to expect, the importance of dramatic licence and the intriguing parts of the story that didn't make it to screen. Creative licence For Forsyth, a story of this scale required creative license - something that has been hotly debated in recent years with dramas like The Crown."People talk about creative licence in a pejorative way," he says, "and I think that's frankly bizarre. You're making a dramatisation – otherwise, why not make a documentary?"In dramatising the story, Forsyth streamlined timelines, combined real-life figures and adjusted events to fit the example of compositing characters is Nicki Jennings (played by Charlotte Spencer), a blend of three female detectives who worked on the real case. This is key for Forsyth, who says: "Otherwise, you end up with two weak characters instead of one strong one."Forsyth's research uncovered that female detectives in the 1980s were often assigned surveillance roles because criminals didn't see them as a threat. "If they see a female walking down the road, they're less interested," he found the era's sexism key to crafting Jennings, giving her a relentless determination to prove herself. "Women of that time had a 'water off a duck's back' mentality," she says. 'People would think it was a terrible accent' Jennings's police partner, based on real officer Tony Brightwell, is played by Emun Elliott, who was encouraged to use his own Scottish accent rather than adopt Brightwell's English one."I'd rather actors concentrate on getting a great performance," says Forsyth, "and I think that 99% of the time that means trying to help the actor play it in their natural accent."Forsyth gave similar advice to Tom Cullen, who plays notorious conman John Palmer, transformed from a scrap metal dealer to one of Britain's most prolific surreal, real-life moment appears in series two: Palmer lands on The Sunday Times Rich List, with an equal wealth to Queen Elizabeth II. His wealth, however, draws the attention of dangerous figures in global organised crime."He had a very strange accent," Cullen says. "He grew up in Solihull in the West Midlands but lived most of his life in the West Country. If I did John's real accent, people would think it was a terrible Birmingham accent!" 'He talks about himself as the Lone Ranger' While series two continues following Palmer, Jennings and Brightwell, it also introduces detective Tony Lundy (Stephen Campbell Moore), Forsyth describes Lundy as a "brilliant thief-catcher" in his book on the the idea of the loose cannon cop might be a cliché in crime dramas, Campbell Moore believes Lundy actively modelled himself after fictional detectives. "He talks about himself as the Lone Ranger," he says. "He's a self-referring guy that watches cop shows on TV."If Forsyth had more episodes, he says he would have loved to explore other fascinating aspects of the story, like the insurance company's relentless pursuit of stolen funds, Palmer's infamous death and the time the lead investigator on the case, Brian Boyce (Hugh Bonneville), spent in Cyprus. "There's another 10 countries you could have gone to," Forsyth says. "Some incredible parts of the story just couldn't fit into six hours of television."
Telegraph
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Everything the BBC gets wrong about The Gold as the heist thriller returns
When the first season of the Brink's-Mat heist thriller The Gold was broadcast in 2023, it depicted the true(ish) story of Britain's then largest ever heist in 1983, in which £26 million's worth of gold, diamonds and jewellery was stolen from Heathrow. The show ended with its lead villain Kenneth Noye convicted of conspiracy to handle stolen gold, but the realisation on the part of the police that they have only recovered half the treasure. A second series beckoned. As the new season of The Gold begins, there is a new central antagonist, in the form of the jeweller and gold dealer John Palmer (Tom Cullen), who was acquitted of any involvement in the robbery and has now established himself as a respectable businessman, selling timeshares to British holidaymakers. However, it becomes clear that the gold has been smelted down and turned into cash and the police resume their cat-and-mouse hunt for the malefactors, set against an international backdrop. The Gold's creator Neil Forsyth has always been upfront that the show has contained a generous helping of dramatic licence. Nonetheless, he has also suggested that 'the series is very much inspired by real events'. With this in mind – and given that many of the events throughout the second, and final, six-part instalment seem almost to defy belief – we delved into what's accurate historical recreation, and what's Forsyth's own invention. (Warning: comnt Was the remaining Brink's-Mat gold really hidden in tin mines in Cornwall? When it became clear that only half the Brink's-Mat gold had been recovered, excitable rumours began to spread about what had happened to the rest of it. It was suggested that it had been hidden everywhere from a builders' merchant in Hastings (which was excavated in 2001 after a tip-off) to, of all places, Bristol Rovers football ground. The fruitless search for it takes up a good proportion of the first episode of The Gold season two, as Boyce and his lieutenants are thwarted by the machinations of the various criminals, who duly melt down the gold and, with the connivance of crooked Hatton Garden jewellers, turn it into cash. The second stash of gold was never discovered by the police (or anyone else), so whatever happened to it is the inevitable source of speculation. However, the show suggests that the remaining gold bullion was hidden in an abandoned Cornish tin mine. Forsyth comments,'That came from one article the researcher Adam Fenn and I found in the Evening Standard from the 1980s which we decided to explore in the opening of series two. It's very exciting for me knowing that that's never been dramatised before, and it became a key part of our opening episode.' It may or may not be true, but it's certainly original. Is Tony Lundy a real person? There are many new figures who appear on both sides of the law in The Gold, but perhaps the most interesting is police detective Tony Lundy, played by Stephen Campbell Moore. Lundy is portrayed as a brilliant but morally complicated detective chief inspector who refuses to follow the relatively straightforward path that Boyce and the others go down in order to pursue their investigation. While many of the characters in the series are carefully drawn composites, Lundy is in fact a real detective superintendent. Long since retired, he's now resident in Spain: ironically, home to many of the villains that he spent his career attempting to put away. He retired in 1988 on the grounds of stress-induced ill-health, and continued to be a controversial figure for years afterwards. He was sufficiently well-known for the News of the World to publish an interview with him in 1994 entitled 'Bent or Brilliant?' If The Gold suggests that he is the former, there's still enough of the night about him, in Campbell Moore's nuanced performance, to leave doubts in both his colleagues' and the audience's mind. As Campbell Moore says, 'We meet him when he's at the very end of his career, he's hit an absolute brick wall. Then he's given a chance and in a way it's his dream job… I think he felt that it was very unjust that he was being treated like this by the force that he had served for such a long time.' Was the police enquiry really 'the longest and most expensive' in the Met's history? One of the running themes during both series of The Gold is the Met's Assistant Commissioner Gordan Stewart (Peter Davison) complaining vociferously about the cost and man hours of the ongoing Brink's-Mat investigation. In reality, the investigation did indeed drag on for decades. First, the police's search for the missing half of the gold was largely fruitless given that, as the show suggests, it was smelted down and reformed in untraceable fashion. Second, many of the villains involved in the heist absconded to countries that didn't have extradition treaties with Britain, including Spain – where the existing treaty expired in 1978, not to be renewed until 1985 – making attempts to remove or repatriate them nigh-on impossible. And finally, as with Lundy, there was the necessity of recruiting officers who not only had the skills needed but were also above suspicion. After all, there were considerable sums of illicit cash available for bribery purposes. Those recruited were generally ex-flying squad, an elite group of undercover officers hired both for their professionalism and ability to liaise with the criminal underworld without arousing suspicion. In the series, although Stewart's apparent aversion to Boyce's investigation is played up for dramatic purposes, the investigation was a protracted and costly process that lasted until 2001 – and therefore took 18 years from the initial heist – that became about the principle of recovering the gold or money as much as anything else. Who was John Palmer, really? John Palmer, as played by Tom Cullen, was a supporting figure in the first series of the show, and most significant as the robber who got away. Palmer, a West Country jewellery and bullion dealer, was acquitted at the Old Bailey after successfully claiming that he was unaware that the gold he was handling was stolen. When the second season starts, Palmer is apparently a successful businessman, whose Tenerife timeshare activities mean that he is to be found on the Sunday Times Rich List next to the Queen: a source of grave embarrassment for the Met, who are determined to nail him for his illegal activities. He therefore becomes the principal antagonist of the show. In reality, Palmer spent the 1990s a free man. In 1993, the High Court of Justice successfully applied for an injunction to freeze his assets, meaning that his extraordinary wealth (estimated at around £300 million at one point) could now be delved into more closely, and its origins properly analysed. Palmer, as The Gold suggests, remained a source of great interest for the international police, although his descent into cocaine-fuelled paranoia à la Henry Hill in Goodfellas is good old-fashioned dramatic invention, as are his suspiciously regular confrontations with Boyce. The real-life Palmer was convicted of fraud in 2001. He spent the next decade in and out of jail for various convictions. He was shot to death in 2015; two years later, a man volunteered to be interviewed about the crime. No-one, though, has been convicted of the killing. Is Douglas Baxter a real character? The most entertaining character on screen in the second series of The Gold is Joshua McGuire's self-righteous but corrupt financial advisor Douglas 'Dougie' Baxter, who becomes involved with various money launderers out of a mixture of greed and desperation. McGuire and Forsyth are having almost too much fun with Baxter, who keeps coming out with instantly quotable one-liners – 'I once asked for a Martini in a pub on the Isle of Man and the landlord came at me with a poker' – and if he really existed, he should be flattered (or horrified) by his presentation in the drama. In fact, Baxter is a composite, albeit all-too-believable, character: one link in the chain that is the international laundromat for dodgy cash. The presentation of the Isle of Man as a semi-corrupt tax haven where virtually every financial adviser is crooked may be broad, but the famously low-tax regime has certainly attracted some characters of dubious legality. Can the police really use the money from drug busts? When Stewart is moaning to Boyce about the costs of the investigation, the dogged detective suggests that, should the money be recovered from the criminals, it would then pass straight into the hands of the police force to offset the money spent on investigating them, as long as there might be some drug-related offence involved. Although this sounds like a particularly neat (or contrived) piece of dramatic invention, the Drug Trafficking Offences Act was a real piece of legislation that was introduced in 1986, as a result of Operation Julie: an attempt to recover the profits that were made from a major LSD-smuggling ring in the 1970s. The act was later replaced by the 1994 Drug Trafficking Act, which broadened the scope to suggest that a confiscation order of a defendant's assets might be made if they were found guilty of having received 'payment or any other reward' from drug-related activities. Therefore, while the original Brink's-Mat robbery had nothing to do with narcotics, by the time that the considerable sums of money being involved were being used to finance and facilitate international drug deals, it had inadvertently played right into the Met's hands. Did Kenneth Noye kill someone by accident in a road rage incident – or was it deliberate? The surprise reappearance of Jack Lowden's Kenneth Noye in Tenerife at the end of the show's third episode, asking a reluctant Palmer for help, was revealed in the programme's trailers, as otherwise it might have been a genuinely surprising twist. By the time that he re-enters the second series, Noye has been released on licence after serving eight years of his fourteen-year sentence for conspiracy charges, and promptly goes on the run after murdering a 21-year old motorist, Stephen Cameron, in what was widely reported as a road rage incident. The show implies that Noye had acted with deliberate intent. Noye, who is still alive – unlike many of the villains depicted in the show – was said to have been flattered by the casting of the charismatic Lowden in the first season; it will be interesting to see whether his reappearance leads to similar admiration. Are 'supergrasses' a real phenomenon? When the Comic Strip group released their comedy The Supergrass in 1985, in which a nobody boasts about being a successful drug smuggler and is mistaken for a police informant, the idea of the 'supergrass' was an unfamiliar one; so much so that they might have been believed to invent it. The 'grass' – or informant – has been a well-known feature of the legal system since the late 1930s, when the word was used to describe a police stooge; the expression came from the term 'snake in the grass'. But the term 'supergrass' first emerged in the early 1970s to denote someone whose knowledge might be able to crack open and convict whole criminal networks. But this idea was always more optimistic than anything else, and by around 1985, the term 'supergrass' had fallen into abeyance. The system was discontinued after a series of high-profile trials in Northern Ireland fell apart due to the 'bizarre, incredible and contradictory' statements of one such supergrass, and many of the informants' evidence was regarded as tainted. By the time that the second series of The Gold begins in the early 1990s, supergrasses were largely obsolete (although they would, of course, give their name to the Britpop band). Therefore, the late introduction of an old-school villain (who shall remain nameless here) who is secretly working for the police is a surprising throwback, as is the revelation of which of the central characters has been in charge of them. This epitomises the tense, at times compromised relationship between the police and criminals – and the blurred lines between the two – which becomes such a central feature of The Gold. The first season of the show was one of the most popular dramas on the BBC in the past few years, and there's no reason why the second instalment shouldn't recreate its success. But go in expecting dramatic invention, rather than documentary fact, and you won't be disappointed.
Daily Mail
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Gold on BBC1: Gold, greed, booze... this caper has the hallmarks of a classic crime flick
The Gold (BBC Where would you hide £10 million in gold bars? You can't bury it in the back garden — that's the first place police will look. Lock-up garages are too risky. Those places are apt to get burgled . . . the problem with being a big-time crook these days is that there are so many petty thieves. I'd go for the Gothic option — an overgrown Victorian graveyard. Plenty of cities have them, with tombstones and cracked sarcophagi all at crazy angles, overgrown by ivy. Take a crowbar, prise a few open, and conceal the ingots with the coffins. Ingeniously creepy, don't you think? Neil Forsyth, writer of The Gold, has a different theory for what happened to the missing half of the Brink's-Mat bullion. As he told Nicole Lampert, in the Daily Mail's Weekend magazine, it's an idea that was floating around in the 1980s: one of the villains behind Britain's biggest heist simply hid his haul in a Cornish tin mine. That's the basis for this comedy-thriller's second series. Good luck to anyone who hasn't seen the first run, aired in 2023, because many characters return with no introductions, including Hugh Bonneville as the luckless Met detective DCS Brian Boyce. Hugh, doing a gruff South London accent, is never quite convincing playing a straight-as-a-die copper who aims to get results by twisting a few arms and wearing out a lot of shoe leather. He lacks stolidness. There's always an edge of irony in his voice, a knowingness that doesn't fully match his character. But he's on a losing wicket from the start, because all Forsyth's sympathies are with the robbers and their associates. The chief failing of the first series was its insistence on making them likeable, even lovable — when the truth is that men such as Kenneth Noye and John Palmer were obnoxious thugs. Noye, played by Jack Lowden, hasn't returned yet, but Palmer (Tom Cullen) takes a central role. This time, at least, we can see what a vicious man he is — conning retirees into buying worthless timeshares in Tenerife, and lashing out with increasing violence as his paranoia grows. The real entertainment comes from supporting roles, especially Joshua McGuire as a spitefully camp accountant who specialises in tax dodges, and Peter Davison as the wonderfully snobbish Met Commissioner. Stephen Campbell Moore is effortlessly watchable, too, as a bent copper who sees himself as the Lone Ranger. Forsyth's reverence for classic gangland flicks shone through in a closing sequence of smelting gold, bundles of cash, boozing and greed, all set to a soundtrack of electronic music. It recalled one of the great crime movies, Thief, starring James Caan. Sam Spruell plays Charlie Miller, the crafty wide boy who is landed with that tricky problem of stashing a ton-and-a-half of ingots somewhere safe. The Cornish mine is his masterplan. Personally, I wouldn't risk it. The Famous Five are bound to stumble across it on a holiday adventure. 'I say, you fellows — look what Timmy's found!'
