Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10

Cast: Kenneth Cranham, Timothy Spall, David Hayman, Alex Norton, Brian F. O’ Byrne, Geoff Bell, Nasser Memarzia, Amira Ghazalla, Lucy Thackeray, Tom Christian, Thomas Coombes, T’Nia Miller, Paul Blackwell, Karl Farrer, Ian Puleston-Davies, Deborah Rock, Toni Thorpe.

Crime may not pay, but it sure seems to sell. You only have to look inside any national bookshop and see the array of literature and investigational journalism that covers the subject to understand how we perhaps see those that spend their time immersed on being the wrong side of the law, more than just villains, they are the people in which we seem, depending on the nature of the criminal act committed, to owe respect to, we see in them our darker selves, and where as we won’t admit to wanting to break the law, the conversations we may have had, especially when it comes to robbery, when asked, what amount would you have to steal to walk in those shoes, what is the price of your soul?

You must always get the cynical thought out of your mind first, for then you can concentrate on the positive where and when they must fall; however, and despite the strength of the acting fraternity on screen, it seems that there is a deep fascination within media for the story behind the robbery of Hatton Garden that has not really had the call for it be so, that the memory of the event is still very much within recent times enough to already have received television and film treatment, and by adding a third into the mix just gives off the impression that the nation is obsessed by the crime.

Hatton Garden has become a byword for celebrity criminality, in the same vein as the Great Train Robbery, and it is in the conviction, the sheer audacity of the perpetrators themselves that gives the cause celebre its national fascination. It may be difficult to understand the wealth of good luck to ’em syndrome which accompanies these acts, but in Paul Whittington’s direction of Kenneth Cranham, David Hayman and Timothy Spall, perhaps that difficulty is overcome, and whilst we can dissociate ourselves from the actual gang that took a vast fortune of other people’s money and jewels, it is uncomplicated to see the sympathy generated when placed in the hands of actors who bring a different dimension to the real life characters.

The overriding issue facing this four-part serial is how to continue justifying cinema and television’s angle on an event that is only a few years old, daring and provocative though it may be, it still doesn’t hold that the air time spared and consumed by the event is arguably warranted; after all how much more can be said when we surely have been given all the perspectives and answers that are required to make up our minds about it.

A good drama; intelligently told but placed within a subject matter that has become too constricted to matter fully.

Ian D. Hall