The Gold: The Inside Story, review: this documentary rights the wrongs of the BBC's drama

Anita Singh
·2 min read
The real Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Boyce, in the late 1970s - BBC
The real Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Boyce, in the late 1970s - BBC

If you watched and enjoyed The Gold on BBC One, then here is the real thing. The Gold: The Inside Story is the true account of the Brink's-Mat robbery, as told by the coppers who investigated it. One of them was Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Boyce, who was in charge of the case and was played on screen by Hugh Bonneville. I’ve got to hand it to Hugh, he got the voice just right.

We started with the robbery itself – Britain’s biggest gold heist, carried out by an armed gang on a Heathrow trading estate in November 1983. You may know, from the dramatised version, that one of the security guards was the inside man. Here, we saw the guards being asked to reconstruct the raid, with one of them (Anthony Black) revealing himself to be guilty.

I thought The Gold was a gripping drama but one that couldn’t disguise its admiration for the criminals. Watching the documentary only cemented that unsettling feeling. We heard that the guards were found “in an incredible state of distress” with their clothes cut off them. In the fictionalised version, that was downplayed.

When Kenneth Noye stabbed to death an undercover police officer, John Fordham, in the grounds of his home, it wasn’t shown in the drama at all. Here, one of Fordham’s colleagues shared what happened that night. “I said, ‘Do you realise you’ve left a police officer dying at the bottom of your garden?’ He said, ‘I don’t give a f--k who he is. I hope he dies.’” That colleague smashed Noye in the face, as evidenced by the mugshot picture of Noye with a black eye.

Journalist Andrew Hogg, who investigated the robbery - BBC
Journalist Andrew Hogg, who investigated the robbery - BBC

At Fordham’s funeral, his father told Boyce: “I hold you responsible for my son’s death.” Boyce replied: “Well, in some ways I am. That was my duty.” When Noye was cleared of murder, Fordham’s colleagues wept with frustration at the verdict. Years later, Noye would be jailed for another murder, of motorist Stephen Cameron. The 1980s were conjured by news footage from the time, including John Palmer granting an interview to Kate Adie from his extended holiday in the Med, and a soundtrack of the decade’s hits.

The documentary fell away in its latter stages when it moved away from the detectives’ recollections and attempted to trace how the money from that gold went first into the construction of London Docklands and then into the drugs trade in Miami and ecstasy dealing in Britain – too sprawling a subject to be dealt with here.