We know what happens next in the story of the £14m diamond heist, but the compelling script and the comedy of ageing crims are well worth returning for
For those of us who are pale, male and very nearly stale,
Hatton Garden (ITV) proved bracing viewing. In his living room, 76-year-old Brian Reader (Kenneth Cranham) bent down groaningly to tie his shoelaces before heading off with his gang of ageing crims to pull off a £14m heist in London’s diamond district. You could have put the kettle on, ground the beans and brewed the coffee before he finished. Try Velcro next time, squire.
But it was Timothy Spall as 61-year-old Terry Perkins I was most concerned about. Over breakfast, his daughter told him: “You shouldn’t be going out drinking any more Dad. Look at you!”
“I ain’t dead, yet,” Perkins told his daughter.
Not quite. But he did look a right state. Whenever I looked at Spall in the opening episode of this four-part drama, I worried he had ill-advisedly copied Christian Bale’s starvation preparation for The Machinist for this role as wizened muppet plotting one last pay day. When he cased the Hatton Garden Safety Deposit Company, his shirt collar was too big for his age-shrunken neck; the closeups of the haggard old lag in the van on the way to the heist were no less concerning. Throughout, his sad-eyed stare through untamed greying eyebrows was that of someone on the brink of dotage.
“You get knackered cutting your toenails, Terry,” Reader told his fellow veteran blagger. Two words, here: pot, kettle. Perkins brooded on that slur and a few scenes later retorted: “I don’t get knackered cutting my toenails. I just take my time. I have to be careful with my extremities,” he added, mysteriously. Such was the Hatton Garden heist – the improbable in pursuit of the impenetrable. Not so much true crime as near death.
Jeff Pope delighted in writing these needling exchanges between the two old hands, which was one reason the drama was more compelling than The Hatton Garden Job, the 2017 film of the same robbery, starring Larry Lamb and David Calder. Pope also revelled in the bitter Beckettian comedy of ageing. Once inside the safety deposit company building, Reader and Perkins needed to take a leak. But Reader’s wouldn’t come and Perkins’s wouldn’t stop. For all their thrusts and parries as they fenced during the heist, they were never destined to cross the proverbial golden swords. Don’t look so smug, reader: one of those urinary destinies probably awaits you.
Pope was also savvy in precisely situating the drama on the Easter weekend of 2015. On the radio, the news namechecked Ed Miliband – then a contender to be prime minister. Britain has been through so much in the four years since to make that year’s election campaign seem as distant as the Peloponnesian wars.
At another moment, as the thieves scarpered to the roof fearing a security guard was about to rumble them, the Old Bailey’s tower loomed at the back of the shot, as if foreshadowing the gang’s later dates with criminal justice. Indeed, earlier this year, the last of the gang to be nicked, the electronics whiz known as “Basil” – real name Michael Seed – was jailed for 10 years for his role in the job.
If only the Hatton Garden gang had displayed such attention to detail as Pope. How could Basil have been so faulty (sorry) in disabling the alarm system? The amber light flashing on the control box, as sinisterly cyclopic as Hal’s eye in 2001: A Space Odyssey, told us that the security firm – and thus the Old Bill – had been alerted to the intrusion. Reader had ingeniously planned to bypass the 50cm-thick tempered steel door by drilling through the walls with an industrial drill. But why hadn’t he discovered that the safety deposit boxes were bolted to the walls and so more difficult to dislodge? It wasn’t only the steel door that was thick.
As with the best heist dramas (think Jules Dassin’s 1955 Rififi rather than Ocean’s Eleven), Hatton Garden unfolded wordlessly. There was much sweaty manhandling of machine tools and testosterone-charged glaring. But the best silent comedy came from 75-year-old John “Kenny” Collins (Alex Norton), the purported lookout. He settled himself in a chair in an office overlooking the vault entrance then opened his attache case which contained the biggest packed lunch in the history of crime. Hold on. Was that a slice of battenberg nestling between banana and apple? Just as it is folly to take a knife to a gun fight, surely it is madness to pack cake for a heist.
But Collins’s ludicrous lunch wasn’t enough. Criminally, he left his post to get a takeaway and then, back at his post, sated with cake and chips, he nodded off. Mate, you had one job.
In the basement as Collins kipped, the other crooks drilled through feet of reinforced concrete, only to flee empty-handed when one of the pieces of kit broke down. “Whatever we do from now on, we’d be making it up, and that’s how you get caught,” ruled Reader.
And so, part one ended with the van containing six disappointed twerps pulling away in that Easter dawn, leaving the loot in the basement vault.
Spall’s wandering eyes, though, glimpsed through overhanging eyebrows before the closing credits, told us he had unfinished business. They disclosed eloquently that the gang will return to finish the job in episode two. Although with hindsight, we know they shouldn’t have bothered.