Peaky Blinders gangsters are a law unto themselves

POSTWAR Birmingham is the volatile, hedonistic setting for an ambitious new British drama.

A scene from TV series, Peaky Blinders Ep6 BBC First Image supplied by BBC Picture: Supplied

IN a symbolic opening, an ethereally handsome figure of mysterious origins, dressed in an elegant Edwardian three-piece tweed suit and newsboy cap, sits bareback on a steaming black horse. Slowly, he rides through a period urban wilderness; he is a man — from the way he rides — with a close association with the spirit of nature.

It’s the opening scene from the new BBC period drama Peaky Blinders, and in a few wonderful moments we’re given a figure with some archetypal power that reflects that seemingly universal need for heroes of a certain kind.

And when Nick Cave starts singing about a tall, handsome man with a red right hand riding through the slums and the ghettos, we know we’re in for something special.

Maybe it’s some kind of western, though the setting and the cinematic look suggests Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York but, at the same time, there’s a Sergio Leone Once Upon a Time in America feel about it.

Then a graphic tells us we are in Birmingham in 1919 and the man trots his horse into an industrial seaside wasteland of spewing fires, mills and derricks; uniformed coppers nod at him, doff their helmets, bid him good morning. It’s not often, as a viewer, one straightens up and exclaims, “What the heck is going on here?” but this series proves the exception to the rule.

This is the corrosive tale of a volatile, family-led criminal gang, headed by calculating brother Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), the handsome boy on the horse, and its rise to power in this post-World War I city. The moniker, Peaky Blinders, comes from the gangsters’ habit of keeping razors in their flat-peak caps; as one of the brothers says: “They blind those who see and cut out the tongues of those who talk.”

The series from BBC2 — airing here on the exciting new Foxtel channel BBC First — is gorgeously theatrical, arty, claustrophobic and vastly entertaining, joining those other recent ambitious dramas from the innovative British producer: The Shadow Line, The Hour, Parade’s End and The Fall.

Created by former comedy writer Steven Knight, better known for his movies Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, the six-part series is loosely grounded on uninviting historical fact. Birmingham after the Great War was a lawless, hedonistic and threatening place. The Russian Revolution had created the world’s first communist country, Irish insurrection was a constant threat, and the gangland of the inner city was even more threatening when thousands of young men returned after the war, their dreams left in the mud of trenches, many bringing their weapons with them. There was a concern that gangsters and revolutionaries would join forces, threatening a teeming landscape of constant industry. (Birmingham at the time manufactured more goods than Detroit or Chicago.)

“It’s all based on real events,” says Knight, who was born in Birmingham. “My parents, particularly my dad, had these tantalising memories from when he was nine or 10 years old of these people. They were incredibly well dressed, they were incredibly powerful, they had a lot of money in an area where no one had any money, and they were gangsters.”

And in the series he persuasively tells a story based on family legend and historical fact; a fiction he says is woven into a factual landscape that is breathtakingly dramatic and cinematic, a long way from the history consigned to text books.

It’s gorgeous to look at and has operatic style, grand complicated characters and confronting violent moments straight from the Scorsese gangland manual. In fact it is like a British version of Boardwalk Empire, which Scorsese executive produces. It’s breathtaking, even if the pilot — with so many characters, plots and foreshadowed subplots so fleetingly introduced — can leave you feeling as if you’ve had too much ale.

Directed by Otto Bathurst, the show is given the big-screen treatment, with swooping crane-shots alternating with visceral, voyeuristic handheld sequences. The director was determined to make it look like anything but a conventional historical drama.

“I was passionate that this should be lit and shot in exactly the same way as if this story was completely contemporary,” Bathurst says on the BBC website. “Once I took off the shackles of historical accuracy, then you kind of go, ‘Cool, now we can have some real fun here we can make a really cool show.’ Quite early on in the process, I remember the opening line of Goodfellas, which is ‘From as far back as I remember, I always wanted to be a gangster’, and that for me became this project. It was about creating this world that as a viewer you just want to go there and want to be in this gang.”

The music is cool, too, and perfect for the show. Cave’s catalogue is accompanied by the raw, abrasive simplicity of the White Stripes (metal-like guitar, bagpipes and horns) as well as period Irish ballads and a bit of Puccini. “The idea of the soundtrack is that the emotion of music is timeless, so at that time, that music is appropriate to use,” says Knight. “What I’ve tried to do is make the characters modern, because there’s no such thing as non-modern characters. People are people and maybe they have a different culture, but they are as modern in their jealousy and anger and spite and all of those things, they don’t change.”

The gang of rascals, beautifully turned out by costume designer Stephanie Collie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), look so hip they could have walked off a Vogue cover. All tweeds and flannel, they inadvertently are involved in the aftermath of a munitions robbery gone wrong and are suddenly in possession of 25 deadly air-cooled Lewis machineguns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition.

Bearing down on them — urged on by a youthful Billy Bunter-ish secretary of state, Winston Churchill (Andy Nyman), who is certain the weapons are destined for the IRA — is the take-no-prisoners chief inspector Campbell (Sam Neill). Drafted from Northern Ireland to clean up Birmingham, he’s on God’s mission to thwart “the three-headed beast”, the IRA Fenians, the communists and the dastardly gang of reprobates, with his tough new recruits.

Laurence Olivier once said actors should never aspire to the strengths of the characters they play but only the weaknesses. And that’s what the consummate Neill does here. While relishing some almost Shakespearean monologues, at once wily and holy, he finds a deep sadness in this brutal righteous man, as if the things he has learned in war should never have come back to Britain.

It’s hard to believe it’s the same Neill we’ve been watching this past month or so in Gregor Jordon’s classy Old School, the crime caper that recently concluded on the ABC, in which he was so comically vulnerable as the retired cop trying to handle ageing and retirement with dignity.

There’s a touch of that melancholy in his antagonist Tommy Shelby too. He’s a decorated former sergeant major who has seen the fragility of life, and who still dreams of hand-to-hand combat in the trenches of Europe, smoking opium to deaden the memories.

Murphy, best known as the villainous Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, is mesmerising here. He’s some actor. As is Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly, the gang’s matriarch who, while not as violent, is even more quietly threatening than the men.

Less convincing, at least in the premiere episode, is Annabelle Wallis’s Grace Burgess, the beautiful barmaid, fond of a musical number — “In Ireland my singing made them cry and stopped them fighting” — who comes across as one-dimensional in a plotline too sparingly established. She may not be much of a singer, but her Galway accent is so melodious it’s easy to forgive.

Peaky Blinders, Sunday, 7.30pm (then Thursdays at 8.30pm), BBC First.