Ronnie Biggs

Not knowing a word to your own song, what could be more punk rock than that? These were never meant to be heard by anyone else other than in the moment by that band.

Other highlights include great train robber Ronnie Biggs singing one of the songs, French street musicians who were employed off the cuff to play an orchestral version of the Sex Pistols songs, L'Anarchie Poorly UK.

My second favourite, the Black Arabs quite brilliantly performing a medley of Pistols songs in a full-on 1970s disco style.

Please listen to that one if you can.

And of course,

in answer to Joey's question, Tim, you have to mention Ronnie Biggs as well, because he just asked, do you know anyone else who's gone to

Brazil and

picked up the 42s? Yeah, yeah, no, Ronnie Biggs.

Yeah, fair point.

Nothing to do with the football that we've been talking about.

For some members of the gang, prison appeared to be the end of the story.

For Ronnie Biggs, it was merely the beginning of another.

The fugitive.

Ronnie Biggs would eventually become one of the most famous names associated with the robbery.

Not necessarily because he played the largest role, but because of what happened afterward.

In 1965, Biggs escaped from Wandsworth Prison.

Books were written.

Films and documentaries followed.

With a case like this, it went to their best man, and that was Jack Slipper, nicknamed Slipper of the Yard.

Pivotal to the investigation of major robberies and best known for his pursuit of the great train robber, Ronnie Biggs, Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Slipper cut an imposing figure.

Slipper went to C11, which is the intelligence unit, and there he discovered that there was intelligence from a tip-off that some robbers were planning some kind of raid in the city of London at a bank.

Very quickly, the intelligence section who had been doing the observations knew that the probability that the Bank of America in Mayfair Street was committed by the people they'd been watching, the Bank of America in the city, there's not too many bank robberies per day, they know that they've got the right people.

And then another man escapes from prison.

Ronnie Biggs.

There's the five.

I warned you there was going to be five, Laura.

involved.

Prison escapes.

Ronnie Biggs is out.

How does

The final crew ran to roughly 16 men on the ground directly involved in the great train robbery.

One was a South London carpenter named Ronnie Biggs, whose name the world would remember above all the others.

even though his job was almost trivial.

Biggs was supposed to supply one thing, a retired driver who could move the locomotive once it was seized, and let's just say he failed miserably, but more on that in a moment.

For some of the men, 30 years was simply not a sentence they intended to serve.

In August 1964, one of the men, Charlie Wilson, was broken out of Winson Green Prison in Birmingham by a three-man team who got in and out in under three minutes.

Eleven months later, Ronnie Biggs, the one who almost screwed up the entire operation by failing to get a qualified train conductor, also escaped.

He went over the wall of Wandsworth Prison with a rope ladder and into a van that was waiting for him.

Yeah, I mean, how do they get the train from the red signal to the bridge half a mile away?

Well, this is where another of Bruce Reynolds' associates come into play, a guy called Ronnie Biggs.

Great name.

Ronnie Biggs is going to be really important in next week's episode, so don't forget that name, Ronnie Biggs.

No, dude.

Good.

And also, they're all criminals, so they've all got, they're all down on the system.

So when they go into the database, the police find the following names.

Belmarsh houses all kinds of prisoner, from shoplifter to terrorist, debt defaulter to paedophile.

Ian Huntley, Ronnie Biggs, Jeffrey Archer and Abu Hamza are all recent guests.

Some are here for a few days, some for life.

To the newcomer, it can seem like a vast, volatile institution full of unpredictable menace.

I'm sorry.

If Ronald Biggs come to Everton, Liverpool fans' heads would've fell off.

[laughs]

Imagine it, lads.