The Gold: Fact vs fiction – What’s true and what’s made up in the BBC’s new crime drama?

BBC One’s latest crime drama, The Gold, tells a story so far-fetched it’s hard to believe it could have really happened.

In fact, the story of how six men accidentally stole more than £27m worth of gold bullion is, in fact, completely true.

The six-part series focuses on the Brink’s-Mat robbery of 1983, and its far-reaching consequences.

You can read about the remarkable true story that inspired the series here.

But which parts of the series are rooted in truth, and which ones are fabricated for the purposes of its story?

Here’s a quick guide to sorting fact from fiction…

What really happened

The robbery itself is recreated accurately to all historical accounts. The robbers did in fact pour gasoline on the security staff at the Brink’s-Mat depot, and threatened to set them alight if they didn’t provide them access to the vault.

It’s also true that the robbers were unaware of the lucrative gold bounty, and had anticipated stealing a much smaller sum from within the vault.

Most of the figures on the criminal side of proceedings were directly based on real people, including John Palmer (Tom Cullen), Kenny Noye (Jack Lowden) and Gordon Parry (Sean Harris).

Likewise, Hugh Bonneville’s DCI Brian Boyce was the actual police inspector who worked on the case. He would later be praised for his key role in helping Stephen Lawrence’s family during the Lawrence enquiry.

However, other characters are more hypothetical, or invented for the purposes of The Gold.

One such character is Nicki Jenkins, the police detective portrayed by Charlotte Spencer. According to Spencer, the character was actually an amalgam of three different women.

“She was based on three women involved in this who have been merged into one [character],” she said, per Drama Quarterly.

“That accent is from my mum, who’s from Essex. You can thank her for the accent.”

Dominic Cooper’s character, the upwardly mobile lawyer Edwyn Copper, also appears to be a creation of the series; there is no record of someone by that name being involved in the case.

Creator Neil Forsyth has admitted to using “poetic license” to stitch together the facts of the case and condense some of the more cumbersome story beats.

“I quite enjoy it,” he said. “I find it easier than writing straight fiction, to be honest, without the blank page. It sounds simplistic but [my process is to ask] who are the most interesting characters here? What are the interesting things to happen? Is there a way to make it fit together using poetic licence and making sure there’s not too much story?

“Because otherwise the characters can be a bit thin. The story was quite clear to me from the start. There’s very clear definition of the criminals, the police and those in between, who are the most interesting. It was about finding how to put that together across the series.”

To this day, there are still a lot of mysteries surrounding the events of the Brink’s-Mat robbery, and much of the money was never retrieved.

The Gold begins on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday 12 February.