It was a superb way to end the first season, telling us that in fact the six episodes we just watched had only been chasing half of the gold from the Brink’s-Mat robbery.
The second season of The Gold is concerned with the other half, half-inched by Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell), who was only half-glimpsed during the heist when the BBC show first aired in 2023.
Unlike your standard heist drama, the 1983 robbery itself, which saw six men break into a depot near Heathrow for a bit of foreign currency, only to find £26million in gold bullion (equivalent to about quadruple that today), is of little interest to the show. Instead, we see how Miller and his gold slid under the radar for so long, before he decided to smelt the lot down and launder it.
Miller fills the shoes of season one’s Kenneth Noye (Jack Lowden) – who makes a return after being sent down by the Old Bailey – as the criminal at the heart of this enterprise, who is at pains to squirrel the cash away before the police catch up with him.
He’s joined on the baddie side by smooth-talking John Palmer (Tom Cullen). Viewers will remember Palmer as the smelter extraordinaire.
We find him now having set up a money-grubbing timeshare business in the Canary Islands – one lucrative enough to land him on the Sunday Times Rich List.
Both Palmer and Miller come from dirt poor backgrounds they never want to return to, continuing the first season’s themes on the British class system. With much tactful speechifying, the criminals spin their ill-gotten gains as a way of getting back at the establishment.
At times, it’s hard not to be convinced, especially when they look like they’re having so much fun.
On the other side of the moral equation are Hugh Bonneville as the incorruptible copper Brian Boyce and his two young detectives, still beavering away years down the line. They’re under-funded and under-staffed, often acting out their scenes in drab office buildings with little natural light and hawkish superiors telling them to pack up shop.
It’s not just the palpable absence of vibes that makes the police’s side less of a rootin’ tootin’ good time.
In the first episode alone Miller gets one over on Scotland Yard repeatedly – and has Danny Ocean-level swagger as he does so. In those moments, you can’t help but think creator and writer Neil Forsyth hasn’t also been a little bit seduced by the sexiness of being a bank robber.
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There were murmurs of this around season one, when Lowden’s charismatic incarnation of Noye was compared to Robin Hood, endlessly speechifying on how the rich just get richer.
TV is no stranger to an antihero (Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, to name just two) but it’s further complicated when the real Noye was a gangster and murderer. When he was sentenced at the Old Bailey, he shouted to the jury: ‘I hope you all die of cancer.’
This fact was included in the drama, but a lot of Noye’s behaviour was papered over by Lowden’s cheeky chappy performance.
With a true crime drama it can be easy to get sucked in and forget about the real people affected off screen. Especially when the ones doing the bad stuff are cocky, cool and flying around on a private jet.
But the second season of The Gold has more creative license that also puts us slightly in the clear for being taken in by the villains. Miller and his snooty posh accomplice Douglas Baxter (Joshua McGuire) are composite characters, inspired by some of those involved in the Brink’s-Mat story, instead of being real people.
On the whole, The Gold is once again brilliant. Perhaps even better. Scenes zip along at a clip and Forsyth seems to have taken on board the criticism over last season’s trite state-of-the-nation speeches.
Just make sure you don’t look up the Brink’s-Mat Wikipedia page if you don’t want spoilers.
The Gold season 2 is available to stream on BBC iPlayer now and airs on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday (June 8).
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