Hatton Garden raid to be turned into ITV drama

The ‘most spectacular’ British crime of the decade is to be dramatised, ITV this week announced.

“After the critical acclaim of Little Boy Blue, we are delighted to commission Jeff Pope’s new drama, Hatton Garden. Jeff is a master at bringing these true stories to screen and these dramas have always been and continue to be an important part of ITV drama. I think the audience will be fascinated by this story and Jeff’s compelling dramatisation of it.” – ITV Head of Drama, Polly Hill

Hatton Garden will depict the audacious jewellery and cash burglary at the heart of London’s diamond district executed by an elderly gang of career criminals across the Easter Bank Holiday weekend in April 2015.

Cannes Film Festival Best Actor Award winner Timothy Spall OBE, Olivier award-winning actor Kenneth Cranham and Brian F. O’Byrne recently seen in Jeff Pope’s real life drama, Little Boy Blue, will play leading roles. Fellow distinguished actors David Hayman, Alex Norton, Ian Puleston-Davies, Geoff Bell and Nasser Memarzia will join them to play the men responsible for the daring raid.

The four part drama tells the inside story, over hour long ITV slots, of how the men pulled off the heist which was considered in a class of its own in terms of scale and ambition, and the extraordinary level of planning, preparation and organisation required to penetrate the vault of the Hatton Garden Safety Deposit Company.

Co-written with Terry Winsor, and directed by Paul Whittington, Hatton Garden sheds light on how the gang meticulously planned the raid, the tensions amongst the group, the loss of livelihoods suffered by the box holders and the complex police operation that captured the gang.

“This is one of the most high profile crimes of the last decade and we wanted to understand what had happened – and why it had happened. The research threw up some fascinating detail and blew away many of the misconceptions about this story. It was not about a bunch of ‘loveable old blokes’, many box holders lost everything in the raid and we will reflect this. But the planning was clever and the characters involved unique.” – Jeff Pope, Head of Factual Drama, ITV Studios