BBC commissions The Gold, a gripping new drama inspired by the true story of the Brink’s-Mat robbery

Dramatising the ‘crime of the century’, the six-part series was commissioned by Piers Wenger, Director of BBC Drama and will be written by Neil Forsyth (Guilt, Eric, Ernie & Me).

On the 26 November 1983, six armed men broke into the Brink’s-Mat security depot near London’s Heathrow Airport, and inadvertently stumbled across gold bullion worth £26m. What started as ‘a typical Old Kent Road armed robbery’ according to detectives at the time, became a seminal event in British criminal history, remarkable not only for the scale of the theft, at the time the biggest in world history, but for its wider legacy.

The disposal of the bullion caused the birth of large-scale international money laundering, provided 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. Based on extensive research and interviews with those involved in the events, The Gold takes a pulsating journey into a 1980’s world awash with cheap money and loosened morals to tell this extraordinary and epic story for the first time in its entirety.

You can read more in the BBC announcement. We’ll bring details of casting and transmission date when we get them.