Peaky Blinders: a chapter of England’s secret history

Pick of the day: Peaky Blinders, ABC2, 9.20pm.

Cillian Murphy in a scene from Peaky Blinders.

Pick of the day: Peaky Blinders, ABC2, 9.20pm.

This compelling series has been recently obtained by the ABC after screenings on Foxtel’s BBC First. And it’s a cracker, the corrosive tale of a volatile, family-led criminal gang, headed by calculating brother Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), and its rise to power in post-World War I Birmingham. “Peaky blinders” comes from the gangsters’ habit of keeping razors in their flat-peak caps.

As one of Murphy’s brothers says, “They blind those who see and cut out the tongues of those who talk.”

The series from BBC2 — co-starring Sam Neill in brilliant form and the always watchable Helen McCrory — 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. The opening is one of the best in recent TV drama: 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. 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.

Then a graphic tells us we are in Birmingham in 1919 and the man — Tommy Shelby — trots his horse into an industrial seaside wasteland of spewing fires, mills and derricks; uniformed coppers doff their helmets, bid him good morning. And well they should, as he’s come into possession of a shipment of guns from the local BSA factory. Aware that keeping them could lead to trouble with the law, he nonetheless wants to use the guns to increase the Peakys’ power.

The show is superbly realised, a dazzling picture that will blow away preconceptions even though the characters and events are taken from the pages of England’s secret history.