The question at the heart of Inside Men is simple: which stops us from breaking the law … the knowledge that it’s wrong or a fear of being caught?
If the incentive is great enough, in spite of the attendant risks, what prevents us crossing that line? This four-drama explores the fascinating and ever-pertinent dilemma from the perspective of three ordinary men working together at a place where temptation is always at hand – a security depot handling millions of pounds for banks and businesses.
There’s John (Steven Mackintosh), the decent but diffident boss of the cash counting house that has been regularly the best in the company for balancing the books – partly because he’s been covering any small discrepancies with his own money – whose style of management is decidedly non-confrontational and home life is a model of suburban humdrumness. ‘My husband’s not a hero,’ his wife remarks.
Security guard Chris (Ashley Walters) is another fundamentally good guy who looks after his alcoholic mother in his spare time and isn’t averse to illicit freebies from the shop where his teenage girlfriend Dita works.
Finally, there’s warehouse worker Marcus (Warren Brown) – again, a basically decent and hardworking fella, but with no qualms about handling hooky gear, paying off debts with a very different kind of gear (he has a special smoking den in his shed) or trying to sell plans of the secure facility in which he works to the dodgy acquaintances of his brother-in-law.
It’s not hard to guess which of these three comes up with the initial plan to steal some of the wonga stacked up around the depot like undistributed copies of Michael Gove’s personally inscribed Bible.
However, Marcus isn’t quite as clever as he thinks he is, and his scheme for ripping off fifty grand founders. He and uneasy co-conspirator Chris are summoned to the boss’s office, but instead of calling the police, John is quietly scornful of the risks his two employees took for such a paltry sum and has already started thinking about theft on a much grander scale.
‘If you’re going to cross that line,’ he says, ‘it has to be worth it’ – and seven months later, a masked gang resembling a posse of tooled-up Yul Bryners are breaking into the counting house to steal a much vaster wodge of cash: £150 million.
The timeframe of this opening episode jumps like an excitable terrier, starting at the heist and then backtracking to its inception before returning to the crime for the climax. The forthcoming instalments will presumably show the build-up to the robbery, as well as its fallout, but it’s the latter which is of most interest.
John, Chris and Marcus are not professional criminals; they’re not even wannabe gangsters from a Guy Ritchie movie. They’re ordinary, fairly likeable blokes with conventional lives and decent streaks far wider than any strain of immorality; how they come to terms with the enormity of what they’ve done should prove to be far more interesting than the whys and wherefores of howtheydunnit.
Whether it’s pliant enough a plot to stretch out over four episodes without splitting remains to be seen, but the three principal actors – along with the ever-dependable Kierston Wareing as Marcus’s girlfriend Gina – are engaging enough to continue eliciting emotional responses from the audience even if the story has tapered off.
Although they’ve done wrong (and remember, kids: crime doesn’t pay), you can’t help wanting them to get away with it.
Airs at 9pm on Thursday 2nd February 2012 on BBC One.
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