Precious Metal

On 26 November 1983, six armed men broke into a warehouse at Heathrow, aided by a security guard who was an accomplice, expecting to steal around £1 million in foreign currency from the safe. Instead, they discovered 3 tonnes of gold bullion - not inside but outside the safe - worth £26 million (close to £100 million at today's valuation), so they took that instead

This was the Brinks-Mat robbery, one of the biggest in British history. It put in train a long and messy chain of events involving multiple murders, charges, aquittals, more charges, flights from justice and endless tabloid headlines as the police pursued the perpetrators, their collaborators, the gold and the dirty money it realised. There was no neat ending. Some convictions were secured, some people got away with it, some were convicted for other crimes, some were murdered, much of the gold was never found

According to the BBC docu-drama about it, currently airing, if you bought anything gold after 1983, it probably has Brinks-Mat gold in it. That would include the ring I'm wearing, then - Birmingham jewellery quarter, 1985. It's well produced and highly watchable, but with the usual problem of the genre, that it's impossible to tell where the docu ends and the drama begins. I expect someone said the same thing about Richard III in 1633

The drama plays up the class element of such crimes, and pushes the idea that they represent a reaction by the "underclass" against the privilege of the elite, and their inability to access such privilege legitimately, whatever their ability. It may make some of the characters more interesting than they really were, but I think that is shaky ground - you can argue against unearned wealth and privilege without having to raise violent, selfish and unscrupulous men to the status of working class heroes

There is some dark comedy. In one scene, a suspect is under surveillance, and the officer doing the watching is in a hi-viz jacket at the top of a pole like this one, at the end of the villain's drive. No surprise that his presence eventually arouses suspicion

Poles like this one, on an Edwardian terraced city street feel like a relic of a fast-fading past. In the age of cable, super-fast and 6g mobile, how long do they have? They have had a good run: put in place for analogue telephones, they succeeded in adapting to dial-up personal computing, and then to ADSL broadband, fibre-based broadband and wireless routers. For a lot of people, the availability of cheap mobiles means that their role in transmitting voice messages has almost been superseded. It does make me smile, though, that when the mobile signal out here in the sticks fades to nothing, my mobile automatically transfers my "mobile" call to the router (it's called "wi-fi calling"), so my voice is traveling along the copper cables to the telegraph pole, just as it was 60 years ago, when I was taught to answer the phone with "Hello, Stoke Golding 244"