And age shall not weary them...

Say what you like about crime, but it is an equal opportunities line of work, as we see in the entertaining and highly addictive Hatton Garden, the latest take on this celebrated heist, stripping out over the next three evenings on ITV. Executed by a group of greedy old men in a hurry over the Easter weekend in 2015 – I think the eldest was 76 – the heist was essentially a case of “Larceny of the Summer Wine”.

Age discrimination is rife in almost every walk of national life, yet felony is for all – crime in its most politically correct form. True enough, the Krays never employed HR consultants; the mafia had little time for employment tribunal claims; and the “county lines” drug smugglers of our age are yet to draft their grievance procedure. For the underworld, though, age is only a number. And in the case of the ill-starred Hatton Garden caper, that number is £200,000,000 – the rough value of the loot the superannuated gangsters blagged.

That said, the story of the Hatton Garden job, according to this version, isn’t the best advertisement for the wisdom of age.

The “action” starts with Kenneth Cranham, as mastermind Brian Reader panting as he tries to tie his shoelaces, while Timothy Spall creaks into life as fellow old bloke Terry Perkins, slurping on a mug of tea, his daughter saying “look at the state of you” as he administers his morning insulin injections. Often filmed from a low angle, Spall’s distinctive features gradually gnarl into one of the mad diseased rabbits out of Watership Down. Even those bushy eyebrows look lethal. Alex Norton, as driver and lookout Kenny Collins, aggressive and sleepy in equal measure, falls asleep at just the right/wrong moments.

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Indeed, throughout the drama there are constant oblique references to type 2 diabetes, mobility issues, narcolepsy, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and, most unsettling for those of us approaching the seventh age of man, prostate trouble. It is a small mercy for the boys that, when they do break into the deposit, there is a loo conveniently nearby, or else they’d have had to pack Tena incontinence pads, along with the walkie-talkies and the safe cracking gear. Taken together, and despite the scale of the ambitions and sheer audacity, they are less Ocean’s Eleven and more Ocean’s Over 60s. I was only surprised that, when they eventually tunnelled into the vault, one of them didn’t pipe up with “Now, what did I come in here for?”

The writers also make sure that, when things start to go really wrong, these mature villains round on each other like petulant teenagers: “You ain’t up to it no more, Terry,” roars Brian (who isn’t up to it either). The pair have to be stopped from a playground-style brawl by the intervention of the mysterious security expert “Basil” (Brian F O’Byrne). After all, as Shakespeare put it, “Last scene of all ... Is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”, a line screenwriters Jeff Pope and Terry Winsor may have been inspired by. Done badly, as, say, pure slapstick, the juxtaposition of this Dad’s Army crew and the vast fortune at their arthritic fingers would have been even sillier than it was.

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Like all the best heists – both fictional and real – we know this one ends in failure, of course, but the great success of all those involved in this dramatisation is that that doesn’t matter; the suspense is superbly maintained. Thus, when one of the Hatton Garden keyholders actually turns up at the premises, because the raiders bungled cutting the alarm system, our geriatrics have to scarper up about six flights of stairs until the coast is clear, wheezing all the way to a cardiac (rather than police) arrest.

At the end of part one, we leave them abandoning the scene, when they cannot quite get to the boxes brimmed with gold, jewellery, and untold cash. They do so on Brian’s orders: “Anything we do from this point on we’re making it up, and that’s where mistakes are made.” Obviously they go back, and obviously that pretty much explains why the surviving members aren’t living it up in Brazil.