Rooting for the Bad Guy
Criminally Inclined
There’s a moment in BBC1’s The Gold where I’m shouting at the screen as the police close in on John Palmer - a key figure in the aftermath of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery, who later built a vast fortune through suspected fraud and money laundering. The chase tightens, the tension builds, and I’m on the edge of my seat as it looks like he might just slip away.
Which is exactly what I’m rooting for.
Yes, I should want justice, but instead, like so many viewers seduced by their rogue charm, I find myself siding with the baddie. Maybe we admire their nerve. Maybe we resent the systems they defy. Or maybe we just see something of ourselves in them.
I’m from good Catholic stock - Irish, law-abiding parents, raised to respect the police. But even I have moments that make me question how deep that conditioning runs. My husband often reminds me of a trip we took to Zakynthos in our mid-twenties when, one evening, after failing to get a cab, I found myself eyeing the keys in the ignition of a….JCB digger. I didn’t take it of course, but the fact that I even considered it, makes me laugh, even now.
I know I’m not alone in feeling the thrill of a near-miss or minor indiscretion. Friends at the time, after a night on the lash, would wake and wonder why they thought it wise to bring home a collection of traffic cones. It’s that same playful defiance (mostly harmless, occasionally reckless) that popular culture both condemns and romanticises.
Maybe it starts in childhood. I must admit to quietly cheering for Tom over Jerry, Top Cat over Officer Dibble, and having a soft spot for Wile E. Coyote. Growing up in the ’80s, our TV “heroes” were rarely squeaky clean. The A-Team were lovable vigilantes on the run from the law, and The Dukes of Hazzard spent every episode outwitting corrupt officials. We were raised on the idea that doing the right thing didn’t necessarily mean following the rules.
Film theorists go one step further, arguing that we don’t just watch villains, we identify with them. In the flicker of a close-up or the framing of a scene, the audience is subtly positioned to see the world through the baddie’s eyes, his or her POV, whether we mean to or not.
But this cultural fondness for rule-breakers doesn’t end with fiction. Real-life criminals have often been mythologised with a similar soft focus. Take the Kray twins, for example. Violent gangsters with a trail of fear, extortion, and cold-blooded murder behind them - who somehow became East End celebrities. Even in death, they’ve been wrapped in nostalgia, their brutality recast as “old-school values” or loyalty to their own. The sentimentality surrounding them ignores the fact they were, by most definitions, psychopathic.
The same selective memory extends to the Great Train Robbery of 1963. A man was beaten so badly he never recovered, and yet many still see the heist as a plucky, even noble, underdog story.
And now The Gold reintroduces us to the cast of Brink’s-Mat - an audacious gold bullion robbery with links to international crime, murder, and fraud on a vast scale. Very bad stuff. Yet here I am, holding my breath, hoping John Palmer evades the police.
Maybe it’s not just the thrill of the chase. Maybe it’s something murkier. The bad boys in these stories aren’t just outlaws, they’re often magnetic, self-assured. Unapologetic. Qualities we’re told to fear, but often secretly admire.
The crush isn’t on the crime, it’s on the confidence.
I’ve never nicked anything bigger than a bread roll at a hotel buffet, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t fallen for a rogue or two in my time. There’s something dangerously appealing about that kind of charm - it walks the line between confidence and recklessness. And for those of us raised to be good girls, to be polite, to obey, it whispers something subversive: you don’t have to follow the rules either. Freud might say it’s the Id having a field day - the instinctive part of us that wants what it wants, rules be damned.
As a nation, we have a long tradition of admiring outlaws - from Robin Hood and Dick Turpin to, more recently, “Canoe Man” John Darwin, who faked his own death to claim life insurance and dodge bankruptcy. His story, and his wife’s complicity, gripped the public imagination. Despite widespread condemnation for deceiving their sons, the sheer boldness of their actions distracted from the moral cost. Proof that when the target is a faceless institution rather than an individual, public sympathy often tilts, to some degree, toward the baddie.
Perhaps the problem isn’t just our fondness for charming rogues, but our growing disillusionment with those meant to catch them. Once seen as pillars of law and order, the police had begun to lose public trust by the 1980s. Operation Countryman exposed corruption in elite squads, and the riots in Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side revealed the mistrust festering between police and communities.
I was a teenager then, obedient, still sticking to more conventional modes of transport - but even I could sense the shift.
So when the Hatton Garden heist rolled around in 2015 and the papers dubbed it “the perfect crime,” the real scandal wasn’t just the burglary - it was that the Met ignored the alarm and only sprang into action once the CCTV footage leaked. For many, the reaction wasn’t horror, but grudging admiration for the robbers. Not because we condone crime, but because the people meant to stop it often seem like they’re winging it.
And that’s the thing. When the system feels rigged, inept, or indifferent to the people it’s meant to serve, the rule-breaker starts to look less like a villain and more like an underdog.
Which is probably why I keep finding myself, time and again, rooting for the baddie.
Because while we like to imagine we’d always do the right thing, there’s a vicarious thrill in watching someone else get away with doing the opposite. Pop culture’s villains, both fictional and real, offer us a taste of rebellion without consequences. They say what we don’t, live how we can’t, and break rules we feel constrained by. We sit safely on the sidelines, tutting at their sins while quietly enjoying the spectacle.
Maybe that’s why, all these years later, I still remember the JCB. Not because I nearly took it - but because, for a second, I thought I might. A fleeting, ridiculous fantasy of rule-breaking that never made it past the ignition. Maybe I’m not cheering for the baddie despite myself. Maybe I’m cheering because, deep down, I know I’m just a traffic cone away from joining them.
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Confession: when I worked in Woolworths we used to regularly under-ring friends' purchases and our friends would do the same for us. Also , used to eat sweets, crouched behind the sweet counter. I had a wake-up call when I was threatened with the sack for eating sweets I hadn't paid for. All I could think of was what my mum would say, which would be worse than losing my job. It turned out that the supervisor who reported me and another girl often lifted pick'n'mix sweets in passing and ate them. When I said this, Mrs Harris (terrifying but fair) let us off. I didn't nick sweets again.
A long time since I’ve thought about how I rooted for Top Cat over Officer Dibble!