Delayed from transmission for two years due to legal complications, this four-part dramatisation of the Hatton Gardens heist which according to different reports cleared between £14,000,000 to a mind-boggling £200,000,000, the events depicted, from what I've read up in the background, appear accurate and true to life.
Carried out at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit location in London's "Diamond District" over the Bank Holiday Weekend in May 2015 by a gang of elderly career criminals dubbed the "diamond wheezers" by the press, doing "one last job" the series concentrated more on the planning and carrying out of the robbery than the police operation which eventually caught the gang and brought them to justice.
There were bound to be few surprises in the cast with familiar faces from the old-boys network like Timothy Spall, Kenneth Cranham, Alex Norton and David Hayman to the fore and even if some of the broad Cockney accents were tricky to decipher, there's little doubt that the production here played it straight and scored points by deviating little from the well-known facts of the case, right down to the painstaking recreation of the actual underground crime scene itself.
The robbery itself was no Topkapi piece of silent, smoothly executed theatre. It was loud, messy and at times chaotic, with the initial six-strong gang having to abandon the operation on the first night due to their being unable to clear away nailed-down cabinets blocking entry, two members including the planner and ringleader Brian, played by Cranham, quitting the enterprise rather than go back the second night to try again and almost unbelievably, new boss Timothy Spall's Terry character keeling over with a diabetic episode mid-job.
And yet they somehow pulled it off, but squabbling over "divvying-up" the proceeds, especially when Brian comes back around sniffing for a share of the loot, saw the gang make the elementary mistake of not lying low for a time before being stung by a police operation which eventually netted the lot of them, including the elusive sixth man Basil, if not anywhere like the whole proceeds of the crime.
With such a reliable cast, respect for the source material and a commendable lack of sensationalism, it all made for strong viewing, even if the outcome was never in doubt. I particularly appreciated the invention of a composite character to stand in for the affected victims of this so-called "victimless" crime and the way his honesty and humility ultimately shamed the perpetrators own naked greed. I might quibble about some of the P.C. casting decisions with some of the peripheral characters and didn't like the loud guitar music used in the background, but with the experienced Spall and Cranham in particularly good form, this unglamorous depiction of this headline case ultimately proved worth the wait from production to transmission.
