One of the BBC’s best crime dramas is returning for a second season this weekend.
The Gold is based on one of Britain’s biggest ever real-life heists, the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery, in which six armed men stole £26million in gold from a security depot near Heathrow. The majority of the gold was never recovered and it’s understood most gold jewellery bought in the UK from 1984 onwards contains traces of the stolen stuff.
The brilliant ensemble cast is led by Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville as detective Brian Boyce, who sets up a police task force to route out the gold from the criminal underworld of south London.
With all six episodes of the second season set to arrive on iPlayer this weekend, TV fans have just a couple of days to binge the first season if they missed it in 2023.
The show defies the normal heist drama fare by plunging into that robbery in the first scene. The robbers only expected to find a small amount of currency, but chanced upon an amount of gold that would now be equivalent to around £100m.
The rest of the first episode, and drama as a whole, then follows the hunt to find the gold before its melted down and vanishes – which most of it did.
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Created by Neil Forsyth, the man behind Scottish crime series Guilt, the drama unwraps how the robbers quickly went ground as they sought to launder the gold.
In the drama they do so with the help of gangster Kenneth Noye, played by Slow Horses’ Jack Lowden, and a crooked solicitor, played by Dominic Cooper, who uses the cash to buy up land around the London Docklands.
When the show first aired it was hailed as not only British TV at its best, but a modern crime classic and The Gold was nominated for a Best Drama Bafta in 2024.
TV fans took to X – then Twitter – when the drama first aired to praise the the tremendous episodes and the show’s knockout cast.
@charlieray47 wrote that the show was an 8/10, tweeting: ‘Stunningly shot, well-paced series that had me hooked. A gripping real story with a masterclass performance from Hugh Bonneville.
‘One of the best British dramas I’ve seen in a long time. Only critique was a slightly rushed finale but thoroughly enjoyed.’
@Cliff_Thompson1 added: ‘The Gold is utterly brilliant – best drama I’ve seen in a long while.’
@LW_Reviews said the show was a 4/5, adding: ‘Riveting crime drama. May be one of the best performances I’ve seen from Hugh Bonneville & Dominic Cooper.
‘While I thought Jack Lowden was very good I did feel at points his character was a bit too much of a anti-hero considering what happened in real life.’
The Gold season 1 is available to stream on BBC iPlayer, with season 2 dropping on Sunday (June 8).
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