Boxing Clever: Legends
Every week, Michael Telfer – aka Mike TV – recommends a box set to crack open. This time, he’s undercover with a rollicking crime drama based on a true story.
This week’s recommendation is the gritty crime drama about life in His Majesty’s Customs and Excise that the world didn’t know it needed.
And if you’re not immediately sold on the idea then please keep reading, it’s a lot better than its topline premise.
Netflix’s Legends is a dramatisation of the true story of British customs investigators who went undercover to infiltrate the drug world in the early 1990s, on the front line of Margaret Thatcher’s war on drugs.
For officers more used to opening random suitcases in airports or tackling unpaid duty on grey market car radios than fronting up to gun-toting heroin dealers, the gear change comes as quite a shock.
Thankfully they have ex-undercover policeman Don Clarke, brilliantly played by Steve Coogan, to show them the ropes and weed out the applicants that would have blended into the criminal underworld about as well as a chicken in a fox den.
By the end of the first episode the chosen operatives Guy (Tom Burke), Kate (Hayley Squires) and Bailey (Aml Ameen) are ready to infiltrate the drug gangs of London and Liverpool, armed only with their instincts and their legends – the cover identities they need to inhabit and know inside out if they want to stay alive.
The cast, writing and production are all of top drawer quality throughout. Coogan is terrific as the team’s sarcastic but slightly haunted handler, and the leads all do a great job with the sharp script, written by award winning Neil Forsyth, which strikes the perfect balance between suffocating tension and dry humour.
The 1990s are vividly brought to life, for better or worse, but with so much action, suspense and drama to pack into six episodes you barely get a second to enjoy the shell suits and cars.
Legends is on Netflix now.