The Gold series two will make you pine for the eighties

The Gold is a cautionary tale: do not, whatever you do, steal gold bars. Bullion is a nightmare to offload. You have to smelt it down, then sell the bars, then launder the cash. For this, you’ll require accomplices, and accomplices of accomplices, which is a problem when the criminal world is filled with loose lips. Two characters summed it all up rather aptly in the first series: “How do you shift three tonnes of gold?” one asked. The answer: “Slowly.” 

Based on the Brink’s-Mat robbery that took place in London in 1983, The Gold was the BBC’s most entertaining crime caper of 2023. It boasted a terrific script from Neil Forsyth, and was genuinely compelling stuff: the gang had hoped to come away from their daring raid with gold worth £1 million. In the event, it was £26 million. It was the crime of the century.

The show not only featured a top-drawer cast – Dominic Cooper, Hugh Bonneville, and Jack Lowdon as gang leader Kenneth Noye – but also revelled in its impeccable 1980s aesthetic, ‘taches and shoulder pads, and wreaths of legally permitted cigarette smoke. The series ended with the main culprits going to prison, but also the realisation that half the gold was still missing. Where’d it go? This first episode of series two endeavours to find out.

Much has happened in the years following Noye’s incarceration. The gang’s other main linchpin, John Palmer (Tom Cullen), who’d been found innocent despite strong suggestions to the contrary, is living the high life in Spain, building a timeshare empire based on his ill-gotten gains. He’s just been featured in the Sunday Times Rich List alongside the Queen, a fact that does not go down well with the Met. Detective Brian Boyce (a rather too Downton-ish Hugh Bonneville) must solve the case fast to save further blushes.

Meanwhile, fellow gang member Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell), has also decamped to Spain but is now running low on funds. He has to return to the UK to retrieve the rest of the bullion from its hiding place and transform it into ready cash.

But for this he requires those aforementioned accomplices. He happens upon Douglas Baxter (Joshua McGuire), a dodgy financial adviser with unearned airs and graces, who finds himself down on his luck after a three-month stint in prison for cocaine abuse in a Wimpy’s fast food joint. “Not Wimpy’s!” Baxter points out irritably, “a Berni Inn. And they are technically restaurants.”

Baxter is furious that he has to deal with, as he puts it, “cockney knuckledraggers”, and fails to hide his ire. When Miller takes offence, Baxter doubles down. “I’m a Cambridge boxing half-blue,” he tells him, “and if you wish to take it to the cobbles, I’ll take it right now.” McGuire (Love Sick, Cheaters) is fantastic in everything he does, but he is at his best here as a silly fool caught in a world where all the criminals are terrifying and half the police are bent.

By taking the action out of south London and into exotic money-laundering operations around the world – Tenerife, the Caribbean – the second series of The Gold can at times seem like Death in Paradise with swearing, but screenwriter Forsyth has given his cast so much to do, and say, that the collective sense of enjoyment radiates as much as the foreign sun.

At one point, Bonneville’s chief detective tells his minions that criminals are “driven by greed and ambition. They will make their choices, and they will make their mistakes. And we will be there when they do.”

What follows is a terrifically tense, and often very funny, cat-and-mouse chase – the kind that makes you want to reach for a calming cigarette yourself.

‘The Gold’ continues next Sunday at 9pm on BBC One