Is The Gold based on a true story? Brink’s-Mat robbery that inspired BBC One crime drama explained

Jack Lowden, Hugh Bonneville, and Dominic Cooper star in BBC One’s new true crime drama The Gold - here’s everything you need to know about the true story of the Brink’s-Mat robbery
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BBC One’s latest crime drama The Gold tells the story of a major robbery with huge repercussions.

The brand new show is set in the 1980s with leading actors Jack Lowden, Sean Harris and Tom Cullen instigating a bank robbery in London. The drama escalates throughout the series and the thieves inadvertently stumble across £27m worth of gold bullion during their heist.

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The circumstances of the story seem so far-fetched that it’s hard to believe that the events could have really happened.

However, the story of The Gold is entirely true and it remains to this day the biggest robbery in world history.

Here we take a look back at the events that took place during the bank robbery in 1983.

Is The Gold based on a true story?

Charlotte Spencer as Nicki Jennings, Emun Elliot as Tony Brightwell, and Hugh Bonneville as Brian Boyce in The Gold (Credit: BBC/Tannadice Pictures/Sally Mais)Charlotte Spencer as Nicki Jennings, Emun Elliot as Tony Brightwell, and Hugh Bonneville as Brian Boyce in The Gold (Credit: BBC/Tannadice Pictures/Sally Mais)
Charlotte Spencer as Nicki Jennings, Emun Elliot as Tony Brightwell, and Hugh Bonneville as Brian Boyce in The Gold (Credit: BBC/Tannadice Pictures/Sally Mais)

The Gold is a dramatised version of real life events which took place in London during the 1980s. The crime drama has been split into a total of six episodes.

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The official synopsis from BBC One explains that “what started as an unremarkable armed robbery became a seminal event in British criminal history, significantly not only for the scale of the theft - at the time the biggest in global history - but for its wider legacy.

“The disposal of the bullion caused the birth of large-scale international money laundering, providing the dirty money that helped fuel the London Docklands property boom, united blue and white collar criminals and left controversy and murder in its wake.”

What happened in real life?

On 26 November 1983, half a dozen armed men broke into the Brink’s - Matop depot, which is situated near London’s Heathrow Airport.

The six men were aiming to steal £1 million worth of foreign currency, but instead stumbled upon gold bullion valued at £26 million.

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Detectives at the time said at the time that it felt like “a typical Old Kent road armed robbery.”

The gang, some carrying guns, surprised security staff as they started their Saturday shift between 6.30am and 8.15am at the warehouse.

They gained entry through one of the security guards, Anthony Black, who was in on the robbery. The six men handcuffed members of staff and hit one on the head with a pistol. They also threatened to set one of the guards on fire if they didn’t reveal the vault’s combination numbers.

The thieves escaped with valuable gold, diamonds and cash. Around 15 minutes later, after the thieves had escaped, one of the staff managed to break free of his handcuffs and alert the police of the incident.

How accurate is The Gold?

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The robbery itself is recreated accurately to all historical accounts available after extensive research. It is also true that the robbers were unaware of the lucrative gold bounty available, and they were in fact anticipating a much smaller sum when breaking into the vault.

The criminals in the story are directly based on real people like John Palmer (Tom Cullen), Kenny Noye (Jack Lowden) and Gordon Parry (Sean Harris).

Likewise, DCI Brian Boyce (Hugh Bonneville) was the actual police inspector who led the case.

Some of the characters are more hypothetical and they are invented for the purposes of retelling the story. For example, the character Nicki Jenkins (Charlotte Spencer) is based on three different officers who worked on the case at different periods.

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Lawyer Edwyn Cooper (Dominic Cooper) is also a character created for the series and there is no record of him actually being involved in the case.

Creator Neil Forsyth has admitted to using a “poetic licence” to put the facts of the story together.

How to watch The Gold

The Gold begins airing on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday 12 February. The remaining five episodes are shown weekly at the same time.

You can also stream the series in full on the BBC iPlayer as a boxset.

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