2 out of 5

Created by: Neil Forsyth

I know I’m not a student of history. It’s very possible that the Brink’s-Mat robbery – a £26 million gold bullion loss that occurred in the UK in 1983 – is well-known worldwide, and it’s not just my American ignorance that makes it new to me. Still, student or not, I don’t think I’m an idiot, and when a series presents some aspect as a known quantity – this is a British series, covering a British event – I can roll with that, filling in backstory on my own as needed, or picking up from context. But then you have a show like The Gold, which kind of goes both ways: treating Brink’s-Mat as something we all know about, while also trying to step us through the details: the robbery, the investigation, the aftermath. And even from the opening sequence, depicting the first part of that, the balance of this equation is off: overly obscuring what’s going on and only talking about it after the fact, in a kind of art-house treatment of the sequence. If this felt thematically important, fine, but it rather just feels like artifice: a decision that was made on how to shoot the scene to give it some flair, that’s not intrinsic to the story or even an effective way to capture the moment. Extend this to most of The Gold’s characterizations and dialogue and pacing, and only some excellent actors and compelling – despite the show’s handling of it – subject matter helps to keep us watching.

The robbery was the biggest in history at the time, and the several-years-long investigation went across government departments and became an international hunt, as the funds were redistributed overseas. The procedural aspects detailing all of that are surely interesting, and the show rightly revels in those steps, laying out how its from-humble-beginnings thieves crafted a very dense network of cycling the gold through legal-seeming means, and how the police investigation was stymied, as ever, by internal politics, but was also run in earnest, presented here as being led consistently and steadfastly by DCI Brian Boyce, played by Hugh Bonneville. If we did want to find themes in the visual approach, it’d have to be something about duality: many of our leads, with the exception of Boyce, are in an ongoing process of presenting to the public an identity that runs counter to their origins. Several of the thieves (Jack Lowden and Dominic Cooper playing parts amongst them) were once lower class, and are now either big earners or hob-knobbing with the elites; and on the side of the law, detective Jennings (Charlotte Spencer) fights to overcome the assumptions of her father’s criminal background. There’s definitely something there, told to us in countless speeches about it, but I don’t know that The Gold ever really connects this to anything in the story itself. Again: it seems to partially want to take a pass at this historical event to say something – something about class, about privilege – but then also just wants to be a factual rundown. The written version of this is both too plodding and too quick, jumping across years in a blink and hyping up advancements in the investigation without really nailing the payoffs or disappointments of those, but then slowing down for character drama which should underscore those things but ends up being overwritten: everyone speaks in pompous, heavy one-liners about the meaning of what they’re doing. Just calling it important does not make it so.

There’s also a slight distaste to a show that goes hard on a heroes versus villains read in this day and age: cops that go hard on the hunt for the robbers because they lose one of their own; evil, mustache-twirling baddies. Alongside the heavy-handed dialogue, the characters are single-attribute cutouts – white hats and black hats. Cooper’s character comes the closest to being some of a sympathetic role, but here again the show kind of tonally gets confused in tone, not really evolving Cooper’s character once he gets fully wrapped up in the machinations, disappearing behind the beats required to tell the factual bits in a certain amount of airtime.

Which brings me to my last bit, and why I started with mentioning that Brink’s-Mat was new to me: The Gold does nothing to tell me why this was a big deal. And if it’s assumed that I already knew it was, then what else is it adding to that? The show isn’t bold enough to play into moral greys, and I’d say it’s procedural elements feel cursory. It’s a victory lap for people who know the story. For those of us who didn’t, or didn’t know the details, I did not walk away with enough that feels worth a cocktail party story; that is, it feels like the most important bits are still left on the table, understanding the impact the show keeps mentioning the events had.

At the very least, when you zoom out and just read this as drama – as pulp – you have some great actors and some fun moments where we do zoom in on a particular flub made by the crooks, or a clue found by the cops. Lowden and Bonneville are simply entrancing to watch, playing archetypes of the big cop chief and his bank-robbing adversary. So maybe if you go into The Gold expecting it to be fiction, it’s black and white take on things plays like a bit more acceptably, and you can leave any lingering Why? questions behind.