Stocking masks went out with The Sweeney. When a gang of armed robbers burst into a City office tower, in Steal, their faces are deformed by prosthetics.
Some flaunt noses like lumps of clay and ears like giant cornflakes.
Others have Neanderthal brows and prognathous chins. All of them look like they’ve suffered long careers as Tyson Fury’s favourite punchbag.
As they arrive at the glass-sided skyscraper in London’s Square Mile, a few people give them sidelong glances.
But no one will be able to describe them to the police, because the broken bits of their faces are too distracting.
It’s a clever trick, in a heist thriller with a smarter-than-average plot. The first episode climaxes with a delicious and well-concealed twist, and the surprises keep coming throughout all six episodes.
Biggest surprise of the lot is Sophie Turner’s performance. The blank-eyed young woman who played vapid Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones has been replaced by an actress with a subtly expressive face, rippling from embarrassment to fear to shock in a single fluid sequence.
When we first see her, she’s suffering from a nosebleed that she blames on an epic hangover.
Her name is Zara and she’s a junior executive at a soulless London investment company juggling pension funds. First job of the day is to give a young intern called Myrtle (Eloise Thomas) the guided tour.
It’s a neat device by writer and creator Sotiris Nikias, supplying a glimpse of what Zara really thinks of life in the world of high finance.
‘Your job,’ she confides, ‘is not to die of boredom,’ as she shows Myrtle where the bosses keep their secret stash of biscuits (‘Don’t let them catch you in here – sacking offence’).
Turner is the focus of the opening episode until the arrival of Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as DCI Rhys Covac, a copper with smouldering eyes and a gambling problem.
More star power arrives later in the series, with Anastasia Hille as Zara’s sharp-tongued mother, and Anna Maxwell Martin playing a menacing MI5 investigator.
The robbery begins with the threat of violence so overwhelming that you might actually break into a sweat.
As office workers are jerked from their desks and ordered to hand over their phones, before being herded into a glass-walled meeting room, the confusion and stifled terror is viscerally real.
Any attempt at resistance is punished brutally. And when gunmen invade the boardroom, the executives around their oval table react like scared children – freezing and trying to avoid eye contact, as though they’re trying to avoid a telling-off.
As Zara and a colleague are forced to transfer £4 billion in pension funds to a series of accounts, a 1980s-style synthesiser soundtrack pulsates — an echo, perhaps, of the iconic score by Tangerine Dream for James Caan’s classic heist movie, Thief.
Caan didn’t need prosthetics, of course. He was craggy enough already.
