I had missed the BBC’s dramatisation of the Brinks-Mat gold heist when the first series aired in 2023, but when the second series came around, there was so much talk of it (and my love for Jack Lowden had grown so much) that it was impossible to ignore. What an incredible TV show, based on an even more incredible story. The scale of this crime and the ongoing repercussions are incredible.

For anyone not aware, as I was not when I first started watching, the Brinks-Mat robbery took place in 1983, when armed robbers broke into a secure warehouse near Heathrow and made off with a staggering (even to them, maybe) £26 million worth of gold bullion. The story then follows of how they manage to convert this gold into cash and what the proceeds of this robbery went on to do.

The characters are proper gentleman villains, and in the show, Lowden as Kenneth Noye steals the first series, whilst Tom Cullen as John Palmer unravelling in the second series is a great performance. Meanwhile, Hugh Bonneville plays the detective trying to chase them down, with a fun buddy comedy duo doing the legwork. I genuinely think Emun Elliott and Charlotte Spencer as Brightwell and Jennings could have a spin off show where they investigate crimes and banter with each other.

Once I finished watching the series, I could not stop thinking about it. Immediately I picked up the book that Neil Forsyth, creator and writer of the show, had published, and started investigating more. There are quite a few, older, published chronicles of the crime, and other books that focus on the personalities involved. Kenneth Noye gets quite a lot of headlines, and Palmer’s ex-wife has written about life on the sidelines of such a situation.

There’s also a film that was made in the 1990s - surely before we properly knew the extent of how far and global this story got - which might be worth looking at. Turns out I’m not the only one obsessed with this story that I’d never even heard of a few months ago.