Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Jim Broadbent, Luke Evans, Philip Glenister, Nick Moran, James Fox, Tim Piggott-Smith, James Wilby, Gwyneth Strong, Ken Bones, Tom Beard, Richard Hope, Tom Chambers, John Salthouse, Lee Starkey, Kelly Marie Autumnberg, Mark Ashwell, Ross McCormack, Eric Hulme, Alexa Morden, Tommy McDonnell, Al Powell, Alistair Donegan, Matthew Jure, Christine Cox, David Halliwell, Mark Mathieson, Anthony Hunt, Jacob Smyth, James McGregor, Bradley Snelling.

The Great Train Robbery is one of those moments of British history in which can be seen as bringing about a change in the way society looked at itself, at the way two great sides came to blows in order to be seen as the ruler and how two men on opposites sides of the law came to epitomise the growing feeling of injustice in a society that “had never had it so good”.

Aired on concurrent evenings, Chris Chibnall’s latest television delight, The Great Train Robbery, split itself between two different points of view and in the second part, The Great Train Robbery: The Copper’s Tale saw Jim Broadbent take on the impressive mantle of the man in charge of the investigation, Tommy Butler and the actor, as his right as an actor demands, never once strayed off the course of complete believability and yet even for those that remember the details, or even what they believe to be right in a tale of intrigue and stolen money off the Royal Mail Train, the sight of such a dogged, almost ruthless policeman taking down the villains one by one with as less regard for them as he shows his own officers, may have been a culture shock. To find a policeman who only played one set of rules and the coldblooded and calculating way in which he enforced them may be the reason in which he got the job done…but it was never going to endear him to those whose respect he needed more than anything.

There are always two sides to every story, even a true one and Chris Chibnell’s script pays homage to that thought very well, the two men main men of the story, Butler and Bruce Reynolds, facing off in a café in which the potent question was not the morality of the crime committed but the one in which has haunted the nation since, the sentence passed by the judge, whether right or wrong, was politically motivated after the scandal of the John Prufomo affair and gave a license to criminals to carry a gun. If a reason can be seen for the amount of gun crime on Britain’s streets today, then you only have to go back to that decision in a court room in Aylesbury nearly 50 years ago.

Both episodes were performed very well and whilst I.T.V. floundered with their big historical mystery of Lord Lucan, the B.B.C. scored a direct hit with The Great Train Robbery: The Copper’s Tale and its counterpart.

Ian D. Hall