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CATCH US IF YOU CAN
Ten law-abiding citizens signed up to ‘steal’ £250,000 for new TV show The Heist – but with a crack team of investigators on their tail, will they get away with it?
The scene is Thirsk, a picturesque market town in the heart of the Yorkshire countryside. The police are tracking two suspects they believe are part of a group responsible for a £250,000 heist.
The coppers have placed a tracker on the suspects’ cars but can’t work out exactly what the destination is. Until they look at the outline of the journey on a map; it looks like a crude, lewd drawing.
As the police discovered, these thieves may lack criminal experience but they have learned a whole lot from watching crime shows. The brazen suspects, who discovered the tracker on their car, are copying a scene from the hit show Sherlock, in which the detective walked a trail around London that spelled out a rude message.
This is just one of the japes a gang of previously law-abiding citizens indulge in for entertaining new show The Heist. From the creators of Hunted and The Island With Bear Grylls, it pits former and current cops against everyday people who’ve volunteered to carry out a crime – with a very real £250,000 up for grabs.
‘There is this great tradition of the underdog pulling off the perfect crime. We were inspired by the Ealing comedies,’ says executive producer Tim Whitwell. ‘In Whisky Galore!, when a shipwreck carrying whisky washes up on a small Scottish island, the islanders hide it rather than give it to customs and excise officers who turn up. There’s a romanticism about the “victimless crime”.’
For the ten-strong gang of ‘criminals’, producers chose five pairs of friends or relatives who all lived within a five-mile radius of Thirsk. They included Norman Pearson, a decorator, and his son Jonathan, who works in a garden centre, who wanted the money to buy equipment for Jonathan’s five-year- old son Charlie, who has quadriplegia cerebral palsy; stay-at-home mother Dianne Kinghorn and her construction manager husband Ian, who wanted to inject some thrill into their lives; sisters Laura Hoyland and Jessica Bell, an education consultant and nursery school manager; and friends Ben Liwaliwa, a forensic science student, and Georgia Mackie, who works at a local restaurant. Sheep farmer Jonny Easton and his fiancée Emma Webster, a deli assistant, wanted to invest in their farm.
A van containing £250,000 was left unattended for 20 minutes. The gang were told where it would be parked and given a key to it; the rest they had to figure out themselves. And they did in ways which surprised the officers, teasing them
while getting the community on their side. Each pair hid their share of the loot in ingenious places; beehives, haystacks, under an unpopular brand of ice cream in the pub. They had to spend 20 per cent of their share and if the rest stayed hidden, they could keep it.
The officers tasked with finding them had no idea who the culprits were. It was up to them to track down suspects, and gather evidence. ‘I’ve inter- viewed some of the most evil people in the country but I’ve never dealt with such cold-faced liars,’ says Sue Hill, a former Metropolitan Police officer who ran the investigation with help from others, such as former policeman Ray Howard. ‘They were extraordinary but I like to think we were better.’ The Heist, Friday, 9pm, Sky One and NowTV.