Big fan of Peaky Blinders? Add this bareknuckle boxing drama to your list
This rollicking narrative of pickpocketing and boxing in the brutal East End of late-1800s London is simply gorgeous to look at. It has operatic style, grand complicated characters and, like Peaky Blinders, confronting violent moments straight from the Scorsese gangland manual.
“If you pick a story that’s good, that’s rich, it will resonate with what’s happening now,” says writer Stephen Knight. “Today, people are trying to get into Britain on little boats, and A Thousand Blows is about somebody who comes aboard a ship and arrives in a sprawling city that has no mercy and no pity. Human beings don’t change. Love, jealousy, hatred; it’s always there.”
He’s talking of his latest hit TV series, a rollicking narrative of pickpocketing and bare-knuckle boxing in the brutal East End of late-1800s London, the air filled with soot and smoke, and it’s already a huge success for Disney+.
It seems Knight can’t do anything wrong. A former comedy writer, he became known for his movies Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, but it was Peaky Blinders which made him a famous TV creator. It was the moodily corrosive tale of a volatile, family-led criminal gang of the same name, headed by calculating brother Tommy Shelby, played by the charismatic Cillian Murphy, and their rise to power in this post-World War I city.
Their name came from their habit of keeping steel razors in their flat-peak caps; “They blind those who see and cut out the tongues of those who talk” they told anyone who dared ask. It was loosely grounded on uninviting fact but rendered in a style reminiscent of Sergio Leonie’s Once Upon A Time In America and was gorgeously theatrical, arty, and claustrophobic.
BBC’s Rogue Heroes, an unconventional war series that was provocative, confounding and also vastly entertaining, came next. It was just as edgy, stylish, and action-packed – the story about how a band of misbegotten brothers came together in the soft sand and jagged rocks of the North African desert, to form the British Army’s Special Air Service, known colloquially as the SAS.
Now Knight has come up with A Thousand Blows, imaginatively realised and, as you might expect, given the subject matter, occasionally very violent, the show set in the teeming 1880s Victorian criminal underworld. Like his previous shows, it’s fiction woven into a factual landscape, which is breathtakingly dramatic and cinematic, a long way from the history consigned to historical textbooks.
It’s simply gorgeous to look at – though the mix of broad accents takes a while to get used to – and has operatic style, grand complicated characters and, like Peaky Blinders, confronting violent moments straight from the Scorsese gangland manual.
The series is directed and executive produced by Tinge Krishnan and Nick Murphy, alongside Ashley Walters and Coky Giedroyc. The atmospheric stage on which the events take place, a fully functioning facsimile of 1880s Victorian life, was created at The Story Works, a nine-hectare complex in southwest London, once the site of the real Victorian Mortlake Brewery on the Thames. For two years it hosted the large outdoor standing set of Victorian East London docks and backstreets for the production. The production designer deserves a round of applause.
We follow two newly arrived Jamaican immigrants, Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) and Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall), as they find an opening in the violent business of bare-knuckle boxing. While several of the central characters are inspired and named after real people, most of the other characters’ journeys are fictional. The versatile Stephen Graham, bulked up, broad and brawny, is Sugar Goodson, an undefeated champion in the murky world of illegal fighting whose reign is threatened by the arrival of the Jamaicans. (According to his trainer, the 51-year-old actor focused “on using a slow, controlled tempo with gradual progressive overload” technique. Impressive, too.)
But it’s also the story of the all-female Forty Elephants – and they were real – a well-organised gang of female pickpockets and shoplifters, and its “queen”, Mary Carr, played with some verve and impudence by Erin Doherty.
Knight says he came across their story while researching Peaky Blinders, drawn by “forgotten or secret history.” (Historically, it seems they were based around the Elephant and Castle area of south London, many of its members the girlfriends or relatives of men in a gang of thieves called the Elephant Boys. The area itself was named after a rough pub in the district. They targeted London’s high-end shops and turn up in police records charged with theft and handling stolen goods.)
“It’s not so much me and gangsters,” Knight likes to point out. “I think it’s me and people who take exception to the rules, to authority in various forms … There’s always some element of lawlessness that catches one’s eye as a writer, and it gives you more scope for what naturally turns into drama.”
It seems Knight was initially approached by the production company set up by husband-and-wife team Stephen Graham and Hannah Walters (also in the series) with the idea of writing a drama about Moscow. (They head up Matriarch Pictures, one of the production companies behind the series.)
“A story about a real person who came from Jamaica with an ambition to become a lion tamer and became a really famous boxer? That’s pretty much irresistible,” Knight tells the BBC.
“And when I dug into it and found out about this person and his experiences, it was very compelling. Before then, for a long time, I’d wanted to tell the story of the Forty Elephants. Both of those true stories are amazing, and the fact is they were both happening at the same time and in the same place. I thought it would be interesting to imagine what would have happened if Mary and Hezekiah had met – and that’s what this show is about.”
We open on a woman in extreme close-up, panting and grimacing in extreme pain – she appears to be in childbirth. A crowd of onlookers gathers and another woman claiming to be a midwife pushes through the inquisitive throng. As her performance evolves, her accomplices begin to pick the pockets of the crowd. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” the would-be midwife says, “avert your eyes while I make an examination”.
We become aware of the two Jamaicans watching on in amazement. But when police are called, the seemingly pregnant woman simply gets up, and disappears into the throng with her henchwomen, creatures of the streets.
We follow the two newcomers as they attempt to find lodgings, continually turned away because of their colour, until they fortuitously land accommodation at the establishment run by Chinese landlord, Mr Lao (Jason Tobin). It’s dingy and dark, “part of the city where bodies tend to gravitate towards the river and the river escorts them out to the sea”.
Things don’t turn out the way Hezekiah had hoped, having brought his friend to London because of a job offer he had received at home from a Mr Harkness from the East London Zoological establishment that would have him train as a lion tamer. But when he meets Mr Harkness, he discovers a destitute charlatan. Despondent, he and Alec are lured by posters to an underground boxing competition at the Blue Coat Boy pub, where they eventually come face-to-face with Stephen Graham’s menacing Sugar Goodson.
Meanwhile, we catch up with the head of the pickpockets who turns out to be Mary Carr, scheming leader of the gang of fiercely independent female crooks. “Business is good, we’re doing well,” she says. “But real money is not to be found at the bottom of men’s pockets. Anyone can steal from the bottom; it’s time we stole from the top”. She is planning a major robbery, ripping off gifts destined for a trade delegation sent by the Chinese emperor from the Queen of England.
The two narratives are quickly threaded together into an intriguing, sometimes breathless, story of ambition and desire set against the merciless world of bare-knuckle fighting. It’s directed with great gritty style by Krishnan and Murphy, leading us down some cobblestoned and smokey alleys, dark stairways, and tunnels into London’s demimonde, determined to make it look like anything but a conventional historical drama.
A Thousand Blows is streaming on Disney +.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout