The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
ROBBING THE RICH HEISTS ON SCREEN
Garrett, who cites Donald Trump’s notorious 2016 comment that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters”. Trump did not shoot anyone, of course, but he did go on to win the election that year. That, says Garrett, is “a very different moral universe – it’s quite hard to be ‘bad’ when you think that most countries are being led by demonstrably bad people. But we have ensured that there is a big, bad wolf at the end of the line.”
In the case of Culprits, that wolf is played by Eddie Izzard, who is a shadowy presence until the closing episodes. Izzard is cagey on his job description – the drama hinges on his character pulling strings from behind the scenes – but he will say that he is a billionaire businessman.
“I based him on the bad billionaires,” he says. “I suppose there are one or two people with lots of money who are trying to help people, but lots of people seem to get to billionaire status by screwing the people below them and then trying to amass more money so they can die on a bed of gold and go to some sort of golden heaven.”
The steeper the inequality gradient, the more interest there is in redressing the balance. Robin Hood is the archetype, stealing from the rich in the name of what we now call wealth redistribution, and the recent resurgence of heist dramas on television chimes with an upswell of anger at the so-called 1 per cent. The big bad wolf is now a wealthy elite, blithely untroubled by the cost of living crisis that’s crippling the rest of us.
Culprits’ writer-director, J Blakeson, sees the irony: “Our guys are literally hiding away when we meet them, existing on the fringes, criminals against the law. But their behaviour isn’t that different from people who are doing it in plain sight, who are legitimate – but it’s called business or taking opportunities or entrepreneurship. A lot of people get away with it for a long time, then get caught and then get a 500 million quid tax bill because they’ve defrauded the government. But they don’t go to prison; they get a slap on the wrist. Whereas other people do low-level crime and go to prison for 15 years. There seems to be an imbalance and injustice.”
Heist dramas such as Culprits exist to indulge the toothsome fiction that these imbalances can be redressed. Maybe, they say, with just that one last job, things could be made fair again.