I was born a few streets away from where Kenny Noye grew up in Bexleyheath, Kent, and much later lived quite close to his palatial pad in West Kingsdown, the grounds of which were, for a while, patrolled by a lion. It was a favoured area for the Sarf Lunnun crims to settle because, I was told, it was the first area outside the Met’s jurisdiction, as well as being pleasantly leafy.
We had a rented gaff that contained a hideous concrete fishpond. I inquired whether we could demolish the thing and got the reply: “You don’t want to be digging under there, my boy.” I asked a local cabbie thought to have gangland connections what Kenny was like. He replied: “Kenny? ’E’s a diamond geezer. Absolute diamond, mate. Butchoo wouldn’t want to cross him …”
Well, no indeed. All of the above however did add a certain piquancy to my enjoyment of The Gold (BBC1, Mon), the final episode of which was shown last week. This rather magnificent dramatisation of the painstaking but flawed attempts on the part of the Met to bring to justice the Brink’s-Mat robbers — for whom Kenny allegedly acted as a fence — ended with Noye being caught on the run in Spain. Most of the gold has never been recovered.
Jack Lowden had just the right amount of psychopathic menace for Noye, and Sam Spruell was terrific as a character inspired by the Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson (murdered in 1990, case unsolved). The script was occasionally overwritten: I am not convinced that Kenny, Charlie and co were quite as given to philosophical aphorisms as the programme suggested (“We are a union of ruined souls.” Really?), but this is a small mistake. As was the accent Tom Cullen used to portray the former market trader and fraudster John Palmer, which sounded Cornish when it should have been West Midlands.
Palmer was murdered in 2015, case unsolved. Noye, though, was released from chokey in 2019. When he was first sent down, the reporters gathered outside that pad in West Kingsdown, pestering his wife, Brenda, for an interview. She told them all to get lost, apart from a mate of mine who knew the best line of approach. “Hallo, Brenda, I hear you’ve had the place done up lavverly!” She let him in and gave him a tour, stopping at the master bathroom. “All the taps and fixtures are made from pure gold,” she gushed and then, looking at my friend with narrowed eyes, added, “But it ain’t from where you fink!” I wonder where it all went, though? And how many coppers got a slice?
Meanwhile, Mrs Rajan seems a charming woman — kindly, wise and mild of nature. How on earth did she come to give birth to a monster? In Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges (BBC1, Wed) the man who now presents everything for the BBC visited India to pay a kind of homage to his recently deceased father. This involved Rajan immersing himself in the Ganges to cleanse his spirit. I think it would take more than the bloody Ganges to do that.
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I’m also slightly surprised that the BBC didn’t arrange for the Ganges to visit Rajan, given his scheduled commitments as well as his fairly high opinion of himself. When he’s not presenting University Challenge, he’s on Today, and here he was again, bumptious and blinged up with his neck chain and gold stud earring, trying to appear humble at an enormous convocation of Hindus desperate to cleanse themselves at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers — a total of 500 million people crushed into a tiny area to commemorate a planetary alignment that occurs every 144 years.
“I’m surprised the BBC didn’t get the Ganges to visit Amol”
WILDSTAR FILMS/BBC
It was a living hell: I could not imagine being anywhere worse than in this baying, endless throng of people. It also seemed a disaster waiting to happen — and lo, it did. On January 29 about 30 people were killed and another 90 injured in a mad stampede by the river’s edge, and Rajan wisely decided to proceed no further that evening. He got a swift dunking the next day when most people had gone home. How did it affect him? “I feel small and humble and pious,” he said. Just like Nick Robinson, then. He’s OK, Amol, but I suspect it would take a lot more than a quick dip in a river to mediate his sense of self. His ma was lovely, though.
Another continent, another disaster. On October 29 last year the rains hit Spain, creating floods that left almost 230 people dead and causing damage estimated at £15 billion. In Why Cities Flood: Spain’s Deadly Disaster (BBC1, Tues) we were shown the damage done to Valencia and its surrounding towns and villages. The footage of the waters rising and rising, of cars being tossed around like flotsam, was utterly terrifying, as were the testimonies from the people who had to clamber for their lives.
But the answer is that cities flood if they are built on a flood plain with high mountains close behind and with global warming, this kind of extreme weather event is going to happen increasingly often.
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I suppose there must be some people who have been enjoying The Gilded Age (Sky Atlantic/Now) but I can’t imagine why. The third series of this behemoth, set in 1880s New York, is upon us in all its faux grandeur. OK, the costumes are probably authentically of their time, but this farrago of rotten acting and even worse dialogue reminded me more of the 1950s. It was like one of those postwar musicals, full of scenes choreographed to within an inch of their lives and sets that look so much like, well, sets, it is hard to concentrate on the idiotic action taking place.
Can’t blame the Americans, either — this was all dreamt up by our own very dear Julian Fellowes, of Downton Abbey fame, but it seems to me flatulent nonsense, a shoddy soap opera elevated to the level of opera. Fellowes is already getting some stick in the US for failing to understand the American dream, for taking too British an approach to what was a singularly American experience. All that money was to be revelled in, not sneered at, I think was the gist. Either way, I couldn’t bear it and I like to think that Noye would have felt likewise. Diamond geezer, but you wouldn’t want to cross him.
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