The last time we saw Steve Coogan, he was playing a weirdly wimpy version of former Ireland soccer manager Mick McCarthy in World Cup walkout horror movie Saipan. In that film, Coogan misjudged his portrayal of McCarthy as a shrinking violet against Roy Keane’s raging anger-bot. The actor is famously not a fan of soccer – and it showed.
He is on firmer ground in excellent true crime drama Legends (Netflix, Thursday), which tells the story of how an unglamorous cabal of British customs and excise officers was sent undercover to tackle the crime gangs flooding the UK with heroin in the early 1990s.
A similar drama could have been made about Ireland – but such a project is unlikely to ever see the light of day, at least not on Netflix, which is more interested in caricaturing Ireland as a land of 24-hour potato people (House of Guinness, Bodkin, etc).
Then again, did any Irish politician speak out against drug dealers as ferociously as Margaret Thatcher did? It was her direct intervention that led to excise officers going undercover, following a series of high-profile drug deaths.
Coogan is in his element as investigation head Don, a gruff north-of-Englander who almost lost his own marbles when undercover, and who sends his new crew of recruits to the front line with a heavy heart. They include Tom Burke as a bored customs official tasked with infiltrating the London gang that controls a huge chunk of the heroin business.
In Liverpool, meanwhile, Call the Midwife’s Hayley Squires plays a former anti-pornography snoop trying to get an inside track on the heroin network in the north of England.
An assumed identity was obviously easier to pull off in the days before the internet. But adopting an entirely new persona was still a fraught undertaking. Don reminds his guinea pigs it is crucial to have a convincing “legend” – the fake backstory they must sell to the world and also to themselves, lest they be caught telling porky pies to some very dangerous people.
The 1990s setting gives Legends writer Neil Forsyth (who scripted romping 1980s bank-job caper The Gold for BBC) scope to lean into the rave-era madness – the series is suffused with strobe lights and banging house piano.
True crime can often feel as if it is dining out on the mise
ry of strangers. But Legends is a gripping, seat-of-the-pants thriller that sets itself the daunting task of making customs and excise workers appear moody and glamorous – and more or less pulls it off.