Hugh

On Nov. 26, 1983, six men robbed a warehouse serving London’s Heathrow Airport. Hoping to find £1 million worth of foreign currency, they found instead 6,800 gold bars, worth £26 million in 1983 money — a record-setting robbery at the time — under the temporary supervision of Brink’s-Mat. (A union of the American security firm and a British transport outfit.) This event has been transmuted into “The Gold,” an involving British drama premiering here Sunday on PBS.

The robbery itself takes up little screen time; the question on the criminal side becomes how to turn three tons of gold into cash, and for the police, one of recovering the loot and bringing the villains to justice. The cops and the criminals overlap here and there, a point screenwriter Neil Forsyth does not want you to miss, and is a particular bee in the bonnet of upright Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Boyce (Hugh Bonneville), self-contained but always ready to speak his mind. (He is also “infuriated” by what people get wrong about jazz, which he likens to police work.)

Recruited by Boyce to a special task force are detectives Tony Brightwell (Emun Elliott), historical, and Nicki Jennings (a charismatic Charlotte Spencer), invented, who are good company for the viewer and generally for each other, though as people who spend long hours sitting together in cars waiting for something to happen, they have their moments of friction, played for humor. As a created character, Jennings — who, as a woman, has to outline the many steps and hard work it took to achieve her position — offers an opportunity for emotional elaboration, notably in scenes (affectionate, prickly) with her father, Billy (Danny Webb), “by a country mile the worst villain in England,” his criminal career sidelined by ill health.

Though one of the actual robbers, Micky McAvoy (Adam Nagaitis), gets a good deal of attention, the bulk of the series involves three criminals subsequently processing the gold and laundering the money. Kenneth Noye (Jack Lowden) is “a fence with protection,” owing to his friendship with police officers through membership in the Masons. (When Boyce brings Jennings and Brightwell onto his team, he sets the rules as “no overtime, no drinking at lunchtime, no freemasonry.”) John Palmer (Tom Cullen), a dyslexic dealer in gold and jewelry, has a handy portable smelter in his yard. And the invented Edwyn Cooper (Dominic Cooper), an up-from-the-streets solicitor with posh airs and a rich wife whose snooty parents treat him with barely disguised disdain, finds himself working for “a group of businessmen who have a lot of money that needs to be made respectable,” in the words of liaison Gordon Parry (Sean Harris, sinister).

Stretched over six episodes, it’s not a speedy telling, and, in fact, a second series covering a long tail of aftermath has already aired in the U.K. Apart from some surveillance, tailing suspects, one fatal encounter and an occasional chase, there’s little in the way of capital-A Action, mostly just a lot of talk — inquisitive, instructive, threatening, discursive, domestic or speechifying. Though the production is naturalistic — in a way that ties it to an earlier, golden era of British productions — the dialogue can sound highly composed. Characters are given little monologues, often to explain how they became the person they are, that play as the sort of thing that might occur late in the last act of a stage drama: Jennings found the sirens outside her window comforting, which led her to police work, “so that kids like me will be safe”; Boyce had a life-changing moment involving a pair of red leather shoes while fighting in the so-called Cypriot Emergency. Some dialogue might have been lifted whole from a 1930s gangster film. Critiques of British class structure and bad actors within the police department are raised high enough to be impossible to miss.

There are a lot of moving parts in “The Gold,” represented in sometimes brief alternating scenes, and it may take a while, among the crooks, at least, to get a handle on things, to sort out where you are, who’s who, who’s married to whom, and what part each plays in the caper. Though Noye is arrogant enough to root against, Forsyth wants to show, as much as each character allows, the just-folks elements of his bad guys, psychologically relatable sorts who have, from early experience, a lack of opportunity, or a certain kind of genius, decided that the path to freedom is best paved with other people’s money. (“If it wasn’t for people trying trying to break out of the lives they’ve been given,” observes Boyce of his country’s social stratification, the police would be out of a job.) This may be soft-pedaling matters somewhat — to read the historical accounts might give you a different picture — but as drama it pays dividends.

As a period piece, it doesn’t oversell the era. There are old cars, of course, and more mustaches than we are currently accustomed to. But apart from the pop songs that run over the end credits, nothing screams These Are the ’80s. (Compare, for example, the “Life on Mars” sequel, “Ashes to Ashes.”) It’s more a question of what isn’t there. The detectives have a computer, but only Brightwell has an idea of what it’s for or how to use it. No cellphones, but there are walkie-talkies. A tracking device, apparently the only one in all of British law enforcement, has to be imported from Belfast (and sneakily at that). There is a refreshing absence of guns — none of those Kevlar-clad teams going in with pistols raised. (Just truncheons.) And the remodeling of East London into a gentrified glass forest, a minor plot point, has only just begun.

It’s like a vacation from now, and who can’t use one of those?

Vivian Ayers Allen, a Pulitzer-nominated poet who foreshadowed the country’s journeys into space and was mother to Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad, has died, the family announced on Allen’s social media. She was 102.

“Mommie you have transformed into that cosmic bird Hawk that lives and breathes Freedom,” said the message, posted Wednesday. “We will follow your trail of golden dust and continue to climb higher. We promise ‘to be true … be beautiful … be Free.’”

It was signed with much love — literally five “loves” and dozens of red hearts — by “Norman, Debbie, Lish, Tex, Hugh, Vivi, Thump, Condola, Billy, Oliver, Gel, Tracey, Carmen, Shiloh, Aviah, Eillie, Gia, and all the Turks in our family.” A carousel’s worth of family photos was shared, set to Stevie Wonder’s song “Golden Lady.”

The family celebrated Ayers’ 102nd birthday just over three weeks ago, at the end of July. The festivities, attended by four generations of family, included a jazz concert put together by Andrew “Tex” Allen Jr., a jazz musician and the eldest of Ayers’ four children with dentist Andrew Allen. Ayers and Allen, who died in 1984, got divorced in 1954 after nine years of marriage that also yielded children Debbie, Hugh and Phylicia. All but Hugh would go into the performing arts.

Debbie Allen, 75, spoke about her mother in 2018 at an event honoring the “Grey’s Anatomy” star and her sister, Rashad, 77.

“We grew up with not a lot of money. We grew up with racial segregation. We grew up not being able to go to ballet class or downtown to a restaurant or to a movie,” Allen said. “And so my mother, Vivian Ayers, always made us believe that we were part of a universe that welcomed us and wanted our creativity and was waiting for us to do something good. And so we’ve been doing that forever.”

Ayers told Rashad that acting made her one of the “magic” people.

“I said, ‘What do you mean, Mama?’” the star of “The Cosby Show” told The Times in 2015. “She said, ‘You create so much out of nothing.’”

Born in 1923 in Chester, S.C., Ayers graduated in 1939 from the Brainerd Institute high school, established in 1866 for the children of freed slaves in her hometown. It was the final year the school was in operation. She then went on to study at Barber-Scotia College in Concord, N.C., and Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C., eventually getting an honorary doctorate from the latter of the two HBCUs.

Ayers flourished at a time ripe with talent. “Spice of Dawns,” her 1952 book of poetry, earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1953, the year Ernest Hemingway won the fiction prize for “The Old Man and the Sea” and William Inge won the drama prize for “Picnic.” Archibald MacLeish won the poetry award that year, one of his three Pulitzers, while two North Carolina weekly newspapers brought home the public service journalism prize for their campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, which resulted in the arrests of more than 100 Klansmen.

“Hawk,” a book-length poem set in a century in the future, was self-published by Ayers in 1957 and linked the freedom of flight with the possibility of space travel. It foreshadowed what was to come: 11 weeks later, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth. Clemson University officially published “Hawk” in 2023.

NASA in 2024 celebrated Ayers’ work — she had been an editor and typist at the space agency — as it dedicated the Dorothy Vaughan Center in Honor of the Women of Apollo, some of whom were immortalized in the movie “Hidden Figures.” Rashad read “Hawk” at the July 19 ceremony, which honored all the women who worked, unheralded, to make the Apollo mission to the moon possible.

Ayers worked as a librarian at Rice University and in 1965 became the school’s first full-time Black faculty member. While there, she started the Adept Quarterly literary magazine in 1971. She was a playwright, with works including “Bow Boly” and “The Marriage Ceremony.”

She nurtured the artistic talents of her children — and did it for other children through Workshops in Open Fields, a program teaching literacy through the arts that Ayers founded in Houston and later brought to Brainerd Institute. She also founded a museum, the Adept New American Folk Center, focusing on arts of the American Southwest.

“Don’t wait for them to ask for something, just playfully take them into something they have never thought about and charm them into taking the disciplines,” Ayers told the Rock Hill Herald in 2018 about teaching children. “You have to do that. It takes a little urging when they are young to make them stay with the disciplines. They will bless you forever.”

Ayers moved with her children to Mexico for a time, where they learned Spanish and she studied Greek literature and the Mayan culture.

Rashad recalled her childhood in a conversation with The Times in 2012.

“There were a lot of books, and artists frequented our home. And as children we were privy to great intellectual and artistic debates,” she said. “My mother included us in everything that she did, and I mean everything. I remember as a child collating pages for her second book. It was wonderful.”

Ayers was there for dancer-actor Debbie Allen as well.

“My mother took the handrail off the staircase and put it on the wall in what should have been the dining room to create a ballet studio for Debbie to study with a dance instructor privately when she could not be admitted to the best schools that were on the other side of town in Houston,” Rashad explained. “And eventually Debbie was admitted to the Houston Ballet Foundation, but that was because of the private training she received in our home.

“My mother would do things like that. … She was always teaching us.”