Legends review: This brisk Netflix thriller finds Steve Coogan in his element

It's not hard to work out how Neil Forsyth's new thriller got commissioned. Forsyth wrote The Gold, the BBC's excellent drama based on the aftermath of the 1983 Brink's-Mat gold bullion heist, and the police's efforts to outwit the robbers and reclaim the loot.

So, said Netflix to Neil, got any more true stories about seedy organised crime from around the same time that you can draw on to repeat the trick?

Forsyth has delivered with a dramatisation of an outlandish scheme that UK customs officials came up with in 1990. Under political pressure to stop heroin imports into Britain, they decided to send ambitious officers with no previous experience of field work to infiltrate trafficking gangs.

The resulting six-parter is Legends, where the stakes are raised, the tension ratcheted up and the characters even more deeply weathered by the grubby, brutal dysfunction of Thatcher’s Britain. Forsyth's skill for paring a narrative down to just the fun parts makes this irresistible.

Steve Coogan is in his element as Don, a veteran of clandestine stings who trains up the unit of misfits to go and live under false identities, or “legends”, in Liverpool and London, on rough estates and in the Turkish immigrant community respectively.

Legends is funny at first, its montage of a recruitment boot camp where anyone asking a stupid question is immediately rejected being the sort of comic set piece Coogan could ace in his sleep. Don’s lone-wolf eccentricities, boosted by Coogan’s gift for the little tics and gestures that say a character has formed their own unique view of the world, give Legends a running seam of humour.

But Don is also proof that this kind of work attracts damaged people and doesn’t heal them: exactly what happened to him when he went too deep undercover himself, some years ago, is a distantly rumbling mystery throughout.

Don quickly whittles the volunteers down to four disaffected high achievers who were wasted in their old customs jobs, where they checked suitcases or waded through paperwork.

He sends Kate (Hayley Squires) and Bailey (Aml Ameen) to Liverpool. And for the London job he picks Guy, a man who Don has spotted is a kindred spirit, someone else who needs to look death in the face to feel alive.

Guy is played by Tom Burke with a rough charisma that the rest of the cast initially struggle to match, although they all find their stories before long. In the back office is Erin (Jasmine Blackborow), a superficially timid geek with a genius for digging up information.

We know them, we like them, and we desperately want them to succeed as they improvise their way through a hastily concocted, shoestring-budget assignment that will end in them being murdered if their cover is blown.

In London, Guy swaggers recklessly into a criminal network where nobody trusts each other, let alone some geezer who’s just rocked up from nowhere. In Liverpool, the gang observed from afar by Kate and Bailey is just as ruthless, and more deeply entwined in a wider community that drug abuse is destroying from the inside.

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It’s a thriller, not a novelistic slow-burn character piece like The Sopranos or The Wire, but Forsyth finds time to explore the motivations and inner conflicts of the bad guys, as well as reminding us what the operation is ultimately all about. More than one episode begins with a horribly economical sketch of a previously healthy and happy person being tempted to try heroin – and never coming back.

Such nuances allow Legends to keep up a brisk pace without flagging, firing out scene after scene where the operatives back themselves into a tight corner before brilliantly escaping, a device that keeps working because we’re given no reason to believe that all of them will ultimately survive. In fact, they seem almost destined not to.

A band of brothers and sisters who have enlisted for a deadly mission impossible – and decided to enjoy it.

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Legends is streaming now on Netflix.

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