Tunnock’s tea cakes, Depeche Mode and non-stop smoking – how TV is bringing the 80s to life

It’s all too easy to take period drama for granted. Flick on the TV, open your laptop, and there you are: transported to a world that is at once foreign and deeply familiar. But how do you go about building a small-screen vision of the past? And what if that past isn’t from centuries ago, but within many viewers’ lifetimes? This spring, a series of dramas is doing just that – bringing the early 80s back to life. According to the people behind them, it’s a process that is at once trickier, less pernickety and a lot more Judith Chalmers-based than you might imagine.

When Neil Forsyth began writing The Gold, the BBC’s , he turned to the wealth of documentary footage about the crime from the time. Yet he soon found that the key to writing realistic dialogue was not to mimic unnaturally formal appearances on news reports, but to immerse himself in “fly-on-the-wall, street-level documentaries about the last days of Angel tube station before it was renovated, which features “a lot of real London voices”, says Forsyth. “You spot little bits of language that aren’t widely used now and you leap on them because they feel very real.” (One distinctive period term he came across during his research was “villain”, which is used repeatedly in The Gold to denote a certain type of dyed-in-the-wool criminal, distinct from the financially dodgy Thatcher’s children on the make.)