It’s the 1990s. In the middle of the Cornish countryside, a crack team of coppers are making inroads into an abandoned tin mine.
But as they round the corner, their quarry has escaped. In place of a massive pile of gold bullion, there’s just one left: sticking out of the sand like a middle finger. And down the road, an ambulance stuffed with the rest of it is veering away back to London, the criminal sitting in the front seat grinning ear to ear.
At least, that’s what The Gold Season 2 would have you believe.
And so we dive back into this story of deception, theft and cat-and-mousery. All this to-do, of course, is because of the Brinks-Mat Robbery: that audacious theft of £26m worth (today over £111m) of gold bullion, jewels and cash from a warehouse near Heathrow in 1983.
It really happened, and in the last season, creator Neil Forsyth explored the story of how half of this vast pile of bullion was smelted down and spirited away into the depths of London’s criminal underworld, only to surface again as ‘legitimate’ investments.
This is the story of the other half. There are fewer historical sources confirming what happened to this money (one of them happens to be an Evening Standard article, though), which means that Forsyth has had more licence to concoct his story, based off a few newspaper cuttings and off-the-record interviews with criminals related to the case.
Even with only scattered historical references here and there, it’s a romp. We return to the bowels of the Met Police, where DCS Brian Boyce (Hugh Bonneville) and his loyal deputies have been slogging away trying to chase down a trail that’s gone very cold indeed. They narrowly missed nabbing convict John Palmer (Tom Cullen, suave as ever) at the end of season one; now, he’s living the high life in Tenerife, swindling British tourists by selling them timeshare flats.
But when Palmer makes his way back into the national news, courtesy of the Sunday Times Rich List – “he’s next to the bloody Queen!”, one stuffed shirt scoffs – he’s back on the priority list. Soon enough, Boyce has resources again, and the hunt to convict him begins once more.
At the same time, we’re following the track of the other half of the bullion, hidden by Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell) in a Cornish tin mine for a year.
Newly rich, Miller’s hunt to get somebody to launder his ill-gotten gains leads us all around the globe – from corrupt lawyers (a deliciously oily Josh McGuire) to the Caribbean island of Tortola, where former boarding school boy Logan Campbell (Tom Hughes) is living it large on the spoils of the Colombian drug trade. This is the story of how the Brinks-Mat gold turbo-charged money laundering across the world, creating networks that are still being used today.
And though this series lacks the authority that comes with being a heavily documented “true story”, this is still a romp: one that turns its gaze outward from the UK and manages to juggle all those competing plotlines without letting the pace slack up.
Forsyth’s sense of humour is also very much intact. In one scene, old boyhood friends-turned-enemies trade jibes over how one of them was fired for “doing cocaine in a Wimpy.” In another, Logan Campbell hires a thug to get rid of Charlie Miller... only for them to end up bonding over cigarettes and ganging up on him instead.
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As the series unfolds and the criminals’ network grows, it causes yet more problem’s for Boyce’s crack team. But let’s be honest: we’re not watching for the rather staid police investigation. We’re watching because criminals doing things in exotic locations – often with a knowing nod and a wink – is fascinating and a little bit envy-inducing. How about that? Crime might not always pay, but it does make for great television.
The Gold Season 2 is streaming now on BBC One