Hatton Garden – ITV's dramatisation of a daring real-life heist – will finally launch next week, having originally been scheduled to air two years ago. The story of why it's taken so long to broadcast is almost as chock-full of twists as that of the heist itself.
Timothy Spall and Kenneth Cranham play two aged crooks who committed an audacious burglary in the heart of London's diamond district back in April 2015, making off with £14 million in jewellery, gold and cash.
"It's the opposite of a slick heist," writer Jeff Pope tells Digital Spy, explaining that he was keen to avoid glamourising the career criminals at the heart of the drama.
Director Paul Whittington adds: "Audacious as that robbery was, and fascinated as we are by how they did it, fundamentally this is a character piece about these men and how their personal histories and different motivations ultimately pulled them apart. They self-destruct by the end of it."
Hatton Garden was originally supposed to air in December 2017, but was pulled from the schedules at the last minute and replaced by Sarah Parish thriller Bancroft.
The decision was taken as it was felt the drama could prove prejudicial in a separate court case involving Terry Perkins, played by Spall in the TV adaptation. "They had to pull it, very late in the day," Pope recalls.
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"It was a completely unconnected case, but we ran the risk of prejudicing it.
"You're caught in a trap, desperately trying to find a way out. You're thinking, 'Can we re-cut it?' but whichever way we turned, we were trapped, because the case involved Terry Perkins... and he's in almost every scene, so you can't cut him out!"
Pope and Whittington have previously worked together on a number of TV dramas based on true events, most recently 2017's The Moorside and Little Boy Blue, and say that the possibility of running into legal trouble always looms over such projects.
"Every time," Pope says. "It comes with the territory. You can't just wade through things and not think about who you're affecting and the impact it's going to have on them."
Still, it came as a nasty shock when the rescheduled Hatton Garden was held up yet again last year. One member of the criminal gang, known only by the pseudonym 'Basil', was able to elude the police until March 2018, when he was captured and revealed to be alarm specialist Michael Seed.
"Everything we were told was, 'Basil's the mystery man, nobody knows who he is, they'll never find him, he's the Scarlet Pimpernel!'," Whittington says. "Then suddenly we got a call that they'd found him. In Islington."
"Everyone who works on these sorts of dramas, it's their worst nightmare," Pope adds. "And it happened twice!"
With Seed found guilty in March 2019 of taking part in the heist, Hatton Garden has vaulted its final legal hurdle and will be stripped across the week from Monday to Thursday.
"It's a massive relief," Pope admits. "We always felt that there was something really special about this story, and there have been lots of versions of what happened out there, but we set out with the idea that this would be the definitive version of the story."
Frustrating as the delays have been, with Seed's unmasking as the final piece of the puzzle, Pope and Whittington are now able to "tell the complete story" of what really happened over that Easter Bank Holiday weekend four years ago.
"It feels right, actually, that it's coming out now, after 'Basil' has been arrested and convicted," Whittington says. "In some ways, we're actually quite pleased that ultimately it's played out this way."
Hatton Garden begins on Monday (May 20) at 9pm on ITV.
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