WRITER Neil Forsyth has revealed how he flipped his life around after swapping a burger van in Dundee for filming with an all-star cast in Tenerife.
The Scot’s second series of The Gold, with Hugh Bonneville portraying real-life detective Brian Boyce on the trail of the Brink’s-Mat robbers, returns to BBC One tonight.
And this time it was filmed mostly on the sun-kissed Canary Isle – in stark contrast to Neil’s first TV series in 2013, Bob Servant Independent, which saw Brian Cox star as a self-styled burger van mogul.
Neil says: “I remember filming a scene with Bob Servant where it was set on the beach and it was supposed to be a summer’s day but it was actually p***ing down in Dundee.
“I felt so sorry for these poor extras pretending to build sandcastles as they could barely get their spades into the sand because it was so frozen.
“So, yeah, to go from there to filming on a Tenerife beach has been a bit of a journey.”
The first series of The Gold in 2023 saw DCI Boyce pursue violent criminal Kenneth Noye (Jack Lowden) – the mastermind behind the biggest gold robbery of all-time, when a gang stole three tonnes of the precious metal from a security depot near Heathrow Airport in 1983.
Meanwhile, the second instalment centres on real-life criminal John Palmer (Tom Cullen) – nicknamed Goldfinger – who was tried and acquitted of the Brink’s-Mat robbery in 1987.
And that sees Boyce follow the loot around the world, leading the cast to relocate to the Canaries.
Neil explains: “Tenerife is an interesting place. There’s lots of nooks and crannies that look very different. So we managed to eke out five countries from one location.
“So we spent half the shoot out there as we had it doubling as the British Virgin Islands, mainland Spain, Burma, Costa Rica and Tenerife itself.”
But while so much of the action from the first series was well documented through Old Bailey trials and police investigations, Neil and his team had to delve deep to find leads for the new series.
Neil explains: “A lot of the criminals we feature in this series didn’t actually get caught for their crimes.
“So there weren’t any court proceedings to work off. We call one of the key criminals in this series Logan Campbell, who is played by Tom Hughes.
“But he was inspired by a guy we discovered who ended up going into American witness protection. Again none of this ever came out publicly.”
And Neil, 47, even found out that the bounty may have been hidden in an abandoned tin mine.
He says: “We came across a tiny news clipping in the archives that one of the gang hid the gold down a Cornish tin mine. Cornish police even looked into it at the time.
“I am still in touch with Brian Boyce, the real-life cop Hugh Bonneville plays, and I mentioned the mine to him.
“He said he had never heard that theory before but then said one of the robbers had close links to that area so it was entirely possible.
“It was really quite exciting. It’s almost like you’re making breakthroughs in the case 40 years later.”
The married dad-of-one was raised in Broughty Ferry, near Dundee, where he began his writing career in his early teens, contributing articles to the Dundee Utd fanzine.
His big break came in 2010 with the publication of his first Bob Servant comedy novel featuring hilarious responses to real internet scamsters.
Succession actor Brian Cox then agreed to provide the voice of Bob for radio, before it was made into a BBC series with Jonathan Watson starring as his long-suffering pal Frank.
Neil then wrote three seasons of the award-winning Beeb crime drama Guilt before going onto the big-budget series The Gold.
He says: “I feel very fortunate as I am kind of going from a production to a production, which is an amazing thing.
“But you know I worked for a long time to get to this point and there were lots of years of failure and rejection and worries about money and everything else.”
One of those failures was in 2003 when he blew his life savings buying tartan bunnets in bulk to sell at Edinburgh’s Hogmanay street party – only for the celebrations to be cancelled at the last minute due to high winds.
He recalls: “I woke up on New Year’s Day in 2004 with 5,000 tartan bunnets in the flat that had cost me £3,000, which was all the money I had at that time.
“What did I do with them? I sold them to a tourist shop on the Royal Mile for a third of what I paid for them a week before.”
LEGENDS
NEIL is currently working on his latest big-budget series - about a bunch of true-life British customs crime-busters.
The Scot is the creator of Legends, which stars Steve Coogan and which will be screened on Netflix next year.
And he hopes his story about customs employees sent undercover will be a winner with viewers after he had a clandestine meeting with one of the real-life officers.
He says: “It’s a true story set in the 90s about these customs officers who are given minimal training but are then sent undercover into the international drugs world.
“The false identities they came up with were called their legend. So that’s why the show’s called Legends.
“I met one of the main guys who’d done the undercover work. He wouldn’t give us his real name and I went to meet him for a kind of clandestine lunch – it all came from there.”
And Neil was delighted to work with his “hero” Coogan, 59, filming up to 16 hours-a-day on a London council estate.
He adds: “I am the writer and also the showrunner so it’s full on.
“But I’m certainly not moaning about it because it’s taken me a long time to get here and now I get to work with heroes of mine like Steve Coogan, who is an absolute acting powerhouse.”
However, Neil used that costly experience for a scene in Guilt when Jake McCall (Jamie Sives) buys two thousand Fez hats as part of a get-rich-quick scheme.
He adds: “The thing about being a writer is that everything goes into the work. So many things in my life – good and bad – ends up in there.”
But now he’s a top showrunner his biggest concern was trying to secure the services of The Gold’s lead actor Bonneville.
That was in-between the 61-year-old starring as Mr Brown in Paddington in Peru and returning to his role as aristo Robert Crawley in Downton Abbey: The Finale.
Neil jokes: “His schedule was a constant battle between his big stately home and that bloody bear, but somehow we managed to fit him in.”
But the Dundee Utd die-hard insists he will never turn his back on his home city no matter where his soaring career takes him.
He says: “I did the half-time draw at Tannedice last year which was absolutely terrifying. I was more nervous doing that than speaking to some of the big Brink’s-Mat robbers for sure.”
- The Gold Series 2 begins tonight (Sunday) on BBC One at 9pm. All episodes are available on BBC iPlayer from today. Meanwhile, book The Gold – The real story behind Brink’s-Mat: Britain’s Biggest Heist by Neil Forsyth and Thomas Turner is out now priced £10.99 published by Ebury Spotlight.
