The Gold season 2 will reveal details of Brink’s-Mat heist aftermath that have "never been reported"

The first series of the BBC1 drama The Gold ended with some of the gang in prison and the police – led by Hugh Bonneville’s DCS Brian Boyce – realising they had only been hunting half the haul. The second series, once again written by Guilt and Bob Servant creator Neil Forsyth, picks up the trail in the late 1980s to consider what might have happened to the rest.

“We go into new areas of international crime funded by the proceeds of the gold while the police, now a depleted task force, are still trying to engineer some sort of result,” Forsyth explains from his home just outside London. “It’s about how Brink’s-Mat still defined these people even when they were trying to escape it, and the escalating pressures that put on them.”

Boyce and his compact team of Nicki Jennings (Charlotte Spencer) and Tony Brightwell (Emun Elliott) are bolstered by controversial copper Tony Lundy (Stephen Campbell Moore) to focus on two primary targets: small-time gangster Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell, briefly glimpsed in Spain at the end of series one) and John Palmer (Tom Cullen), the West Country gold smelter now laundering his wealth in a Tenerife timeshare scam, and whose position alongside Queen Elizabeth II in the Sunday Times Rich List causes considerable establishment embarrassment.

The truth is always a slippery concept for dramas rooted in but not beholden to the facts; while Palmer was a real person, Miller and his accomplice Douglas Baxter (Joshua McGuire) are composite characters created to unclutter the narrative. Forsyth’s interpretation of individual scenes also vary from the most plausible, to the most agreed upon, to the most dramatically compelling.

“Sometimes people use the phrase ‘creative licence’ in a pejorative way, which is kind of insane,” he says. “Creative licence is vital to writing drama, otherwise why not make a documentary? For The Gold, a lot of it is simplifying a very murky, complicated story.

"There’s no aspect of it where more than one opinion was not available, so it’s about trying to make the right decision: is it a very sensitive area where you have to be particularly careful, or a purely dramatic turn of events where you’re well within your rights to pick the most interesting path? It’s about understanding characters and motivations, then putting that into an entertaining dramatisation. You’re not doing it to be flippant or fudge a lack of knowledge. And frankly, real life is messy and complicated and weirdly unrealistic.”

Indeed, if ever a story demonstrated truth as stranger than fiction, it’s The Gold – one villain’s girlfriend did name her dogs Brinks and Mat and another associate did drop £10,000 in the street en route to the bank. At the outset of the second series, a significant portion of the bullion is buried in Cornish tin mines – a story drawn from a couple of paragraphs in the London Evening Standard in the mid-'80s.

“We found it in the archives,” says Forsyth, grinning. “It’s not online and has never been reported anywhere else: one of the criminals had links to the South West, and Cornish police – off the back of credible reports – conducted extensive searches of the mines. A lot of the research was piecing things together because connections weren’t made at the time. I’ve even told Brian [Boyce, who consulted on the series] things he didn’t know, which was very gratifying.”

As this was a stretch of the Brink’s-Mat trail with fewer news stories, trials and with many criminal protagonists either never convicted or in witness protection, grounding the story in one-to-one interviews was as important as painstaking archival trawls. Boyce and his long-retired peers were once again essential, says Forsyth: “They give you the colour of the investigation beyond the black-and-white facts in public records.”

And what about those people on the other side of the law? “Some of the stories we heard…” Forsyth marvels. “I wish they’d been caught so I could write about it.”

The most prominent villain Forsyth admits to consulting is the ostensible leader of the heist, the late Micky McAvoy (played by Adam Nagaitis), whose theory Forsyth credits with underpinning both series: the idea that the robbers themselves, way out of their depth, made vanishingly little compared to the white-collar figures who, capitalising on an era of financial deregulation, took over and made millions. In fact, Forsyth’s focus on class and social mobility saw the first series accused of treating some of the criminals too kindly; unsurprisingly, he mounts a stout defence.

“I’ve got a very clear conscience because I know more about the characters and events than anyone making passing commentary,” he reasons. “A lot of these guys were charming, which is how they managed to corrupt the police. Look at the character arc of any of our major criminal characters and where they end up – I don’t think you can conclude they’ve been treated in a glamorous or sympathetic way.”

Forsyth’s next series is Legends, a six-part drama for Netflix with Steve Coogan and Tom Burke. He’s off to the set at “another north London warehouse” after our conversation and concedes that, as a true story about customs investigators going under cover in the international drugs trade, it operates on adjacent turf to The Gold. But true crime is a broad church, ranging from Ryan Murphy’s lurid serial-killer fantasias to Jeff Pope’s angular, diligently researched treatments.

The genre, argues Forsyth, appeals because, “viewers don’t want to watch people living within the natural confines of life and making safe decisions”. It can also be unexpectedly relatable: during filming of The Gold in Hastings, Forsyth was approached by McAvoy’s former prison guard who happened to be walking his dog nearby – proof, he says, that if “hundreds were involved in the Brink’s-Mat crime, thousands must have known someone connected to it”.

Most rewardingly for the writer, true crime also acts as a Trojan horse. “Other People’s Money [his 2007 book about a credit-card fraudster] was about a young guy in search of identity. Guilt was about siblings. The Gold is about greed at a particular point of British history. Legends is about people dissatisfied with their careers and seeing opportunities to do something different.”

In one sense, there’s no mystery around The Gold at all. It’s not called Detective Boyce, or Jennings and Brightwell. The star of the show is in the title. Does Forsyth understand its allure? “Definitely. We had some very convincing gold-plated bars on set and I think every single crew member sneaked over for a photo. I had a lively, hedonistic youth, but I have become more and more responsible, because my writing has come to show the appalling consequences of recklessness.”

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The Gold season 2 will arrive on BBC iPlayer at 6am on Sunday 8th June, before airing on BBC One at 9pm.

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