Cops, robbers and nicotine stains: The Gold is a love letter to the 1980s Britain the Irish knew so well

The Gold (BBC One, Sunday, 9pm) is about as subtle as daylight robbery. This is entirely apt given that Neil Forsyth’s yeasty tale of geezers and coppers in 1980s London is based on the real-life Brink’s-Mat heist of 1983.

The holdup, at the security company’s depot at Heathrow International Trading Estate, was the biggest in British history. It was also a reverse botched job. The robbers expected to find £3.2 million in cash. They instead stumbled upon more than three tonnes of gold bullion – a £26 million trove so huge it couldn’t all fit in the vault.

These basic elements of the story are laid out in the opening minutes. Where The Gold shines is in its evocation of early-1980s Britain, a setting that will resonate with Irish viewers.

How transgressively far away that decade now feels. Everyone smokes at work. The default colour scheme is nicotine-stain yellow. The men dress like Terry from Minder and speak in a cockney patois somewhere between Arthur Daley and Del Boy. All that’s missing are fluffy dice hanging from a car mirror and someone playing Manic Miner on their ZX Spectrum.

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Yet if the series shines as a backhanded love letter to the era of Ford Capris and mandatory office-based sexism, as a thriller the first episode becomes lost in a smoky haze and never gets out of first gear. Hugh Bonneville drops his Downton-dandy routine to play Brian Boyce, the bang-to-rights detective chief superintendent from Scotland Yard who’s heading the investigation. He is assisted by Charlotte Spencer as his tough-as-bootnails underling, Nicki Jenkins.

Their nemesis – though neither party yet knows it – is Kenny Noye (Jack Lowden), a fence whom the robbers task with repurposing their millions. Noye is a new man for the new decade. That point is (rather clumsily) conveyed via a grandiose speech about class that he gives at the end of the episode. And by the fact that he zips around Essex listening to Age of Consent by New Order on full volume. No Sussudio or Adam Ant for our upwardly mobile ne’er-do-well.

As the milieu is 1980s London, there must also be a yuppie forged entirely from ambition and bits of Filofax. Step forward Dominic Cooper, as Edwyn, a slick spiv who’s a living manifestation of the Yello song Oh Yeah.

He’s a solicitor who gets bent coppers back on the beat and lives on the dime of his megabucks father-in-law. Desperate to become a man of means in his own right, he’s amenable to helping Noye launder his contraband bullion through Swiss bank accounts and shell companies. Laundering? Shell accounts? Welcome to the future of London.

Cooper plays this fictional character as an anti-hero from a Martin Amis novel. He’s fantastic – as is the way the show conjures the glamour and the grime of the 1980s. The hope must be that in the weeks ahead Forsyth’s meandering script picks up the pace and that The Gold becomes as gripping as it is atmospheric.