Legends (Netflix)
Rating – four out of five stars
Death is never the beginning of the real story. So often in crime dramas, the script starts with a body — a corpse in the woods, a gangland assassination, a million variations on a murderous theme.
Neil Forsyth’s impassioned anti-drugs thriller Legends opens with a double death in 1990, as a schoolboy on a Liverpool council estate is cajoled into trying heroin at a nightclub . . . while on the opposite end of the social spectrum, a Cabinet minister’s daughter dabbles with opium in digs at Oxford University.
For both teenagers, the consequences are fatal. Their deaths trigger a national scandal and a campaign to infiltrate the international hard drugs trade. But the roots of the narrative go much deeper, and we don’t begin to uncover them until episode two.
Those two illegal killings (because that’s what drug deaths are) start in the Pakistan mountains, amid a vast landscape of poppies, as a grower declares the plants are ripe for harvest. I remembered those tinned fruit adverts, where ‘the Man from Del Monte says Yes’ . . . except here, it’s the Man from Hell-on-Earth.
To the screeching soundtrack of Hallelujah by the Happy Mondays, a song to make your flesh crawl, the raw opium is distilled, bundled and stamped, and loaded onto a camel train, before being transferred to a 4×4 truck and driven across Afghanistan . . . and then piled into a flatbed truck for the journey across Iran, for processing in a Turkish factory.
Drug traffickers then distribute it throughout Europe. One man smuggles packages through airports in his prosthetic leg. Another feigns a heart attack at a customs desk, to let an accomplice slip through undetected.
It’s all basic, unsophisticated and ruthlessly effective. British border checks, on the other hand, are methodical, civilised and completely useless.
‘The Americans have declared a war on drugs,’ complains the Home Secretary. ‘We appear to have raised a white flag.’
Pictured: (Left to right) tom Burke as Guy, Jasmine Blackborow as Erin, Steve Coogan as Don, Aml Ameen as Bailey, Hayley Squires as Kate, in Legends
Steve Coogan is maverick civil servant Don (pictured) , their handler, and the weak point of the Netflix series
Tom Burke, Hayley Squires and Aml Ameen star as customs officials who volunteer to go undercover and gather evidence to put the drug barons in prison. Operating under false identities, or ‘legends’, they live in constant danger of discovery and execution.
Steve Coogan is maverick civil servant Don, their handler, and the weak point of the series: he’s so recognisable that it’s impossible to believe in his character, especially with a Leeds accent perilously close to his Jimmy Savile impersonation.
But Burke, playing Guy, a depressive loner with a violent streak, is utterly convincing — forging a double act with Mylonas (Gerald Kyd), a charismatic Greek crook with a taste for whisky and baklava who talks about himself in the third person.
Sitting with his young daughter on the night before his initiation into the smugglers’ gang, Guy reads aloud from Alice In Wonderland. ‘I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbithole,’ he recites. But he will, and we’re going with him.
