Riveting: C4’s Who Stole the World Cup reviewed

Have you ever seen film of the England 1966 football team holding the World Cup at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington, on the evening of their victory? The answer, I can guarantee, is no. Unbeknownst to everybody except a few policemen and FA officials, what they were holding was only a replica, made a few months previously after the real Jules Rimet trophy was stolen in London.

But this was just one of the many eye-popping disclosures in Monday’s 1966: Who Stole the World Cup? Of course, it’s not uncommon for a documentary to claim the tale it’s telling is scarcely believable. Much rarer is for that claim, as here, to be true.

The challenges to our credulity began immediately, when the programme interviewed the man charged with looking after the trophy when it was fatefully put on display at a stamp exhibition in the Methodist Central Hall. John McLarens was not, as he cheerfully admitted, a trained security guard. Instead, he was a struggling actor – whose career reached its zenith as an extra in Monty Python – looking to make some extra cash.

So it was that on 20 March, John showed up for his Sunday shift to find the cup gone – although the heist wasn’t an especially daring one. The chain on the outside of the hall’s front door had been attached with eight ordinary screws. The plinth on which the trophy stood could be accessed through the open back of its glass case.

Not that this represented a sudden relaxation in security. In the preceding weeks, the silversmith George Bird had taken the cup from one display venue to another in the basket on the front of his bike. Even so, the theft came as a shock not just to the police and FA, but also to Harold Wilson’s Labour government, which 11 days before a general election found itself facing major international embarrassment.

Then, on 23 March, the FA received a ransom note signed by a man calling himself ‘Jackson’, but who turned out to be Edward Betchley, a small-time south London criminal. Come the arranged ransom drop,an undercover copper duly showed up carrying a suitcase full of scrap paper with a few fivers on top, before arresting him. There was, however, still no sign of the World Cup – so George Bird was commissioned to make a replica.

Which finally brought us to the bit that most of us already knew. A week after the theft, docker Dave Corbett set off for a walk with his mongrel Pickles when the dog suddenly started scrabbling at a package under a bush in the front garden…

The reward money (enough to buy a posh house) meant that Pickles transformed Dave’s life, as he tearfully attested on Monday. But the programme also made a convincing case that Pickles transformed UK political history – because the story now became one of British triumph over disaster, helping Wilson to his 98-seat majority. Rather anti-climactically, after a brief career as a film star in The Spy with the Cold Nose, Pickles died in 1967, when he strangled himself with his lead when chasing a cat.

Betchley, meanwhile, was cleared of theft, and found guilty only of acting as a go-between. And with that, the police apparently considered their job done, making no further effort to find the actual thieves. They did, mind you, take the precaution of asking a young constable, who also appeared on Monday, to swap Bird’s replica for the real cup before it left Wembley after the final. Given no further instructions, he opted to go into the England changing room after the match with the fake cunningly stuffed up his tunic.

Only more than 50 years later did a Daily Mirror journalist discover who’d stolen the trophy in the first place: Sid ‘Mr Crafty’ Cugullere, another minor south London criminal, who was casing the Methodist Central Hall for a possible stamp theft when he saw the World Cup and nicked it on a whim. At first he put it on his mantelpiece as an ornament – until his wife realised what it was and insisted he get rid of it, which he did in Dave Corbett’s front garden.

Faced with such material, the programme chose to play it mainly for laughs, turning the whole thing into a pastiche of a Guy Ritchie movie. Hence the presence of Ritchie alumnus Alan Ford as the narrator, cranking up his already impressive geezerdom to wild new heights, with every house a ‘gaff’, every neighbourhood a ‘manor’ and regular interjections of ‘you bleedin’ what?’. In theory, this should have been a little tiresome. In practice, it sometimes was – but the wilder the story became, the more understandable it felt as a response to a riveting set of events that, among other things, were undeniably funny.