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From Wondry, I'm Matt Ford and I'm Alice Levine and this is British scandal.

So Alice, that's it for the story of the great train robbery. How did you find it?

It's sort of perfect for us isn't it because lots of the stories that we cover are British

by default but this is British in its bones. A post office train, a monopoly board with

the prints on it, surviving on tinned fish on a country farm, prison breakouts, being

on the run in tropical climbs. I mean, it's just got all of the hallmarks of something

that we cannot get enough of. No, and the fact that they give the establishment a kicking

brings out another British element which is we're kind of rooting for them because they

feel like the underdog and then on top of that there is a sense of injustice because they

get locked up for 30 years. I mean 30 years is absolutely crackers and that

sentencing is sort of a symptom of the embarrassment that the British establishment felt. They

really outwitted them at every turn and these men became folk heroes overnight. They were

splashed across the papers and not in the way that the police would have wanted. And even

when they thought they'd caught them of course, a couple of them slipped through their fingers

and they escaped. It's the perfect sort of last act twist isn't it?

It is. It's a phenomenal story and there's no one better positioned to speak about it

than I guess today. Colin McKenzie is a journalist and fleek street legend who for decades

worked for papers like The Daily Express and The Daily Mail. He was nominated for one

of the top 10 scoops of the 20th century when he found Ronnie Biggs in Brazil after he

escaped prison in the UK. He joins us next.

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