The gangs of Birmingham add to the post-World War I strife

PEAKY Blinders is the moodily corrosive tale of a volatile, family-led criminal gang and its rise to power in Birmingham after World War I.

Cillian Murphy in a scene from the first episode of BBC’s <i>Peaky Blinders</i>

THIS new BBC period drama actually started last Sunday but the season picks up again tonight with a repeat of the startling first episode, then the second following in what will be its regular timeslot. It’s something special, too, its cinematic look suggesting Scorsese’s Gangs of New York but there’s also a Sergio Leone Once Upon a Time in America feel to it.

It’s the moodily corrosive tale of a volatile, family-led criminal gang of the same name, headed by calculating brother Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), and its rise to power in this post-World War I city. The name comes from their habit of keeping steel 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 BBC2 series is gorgeously theatrical, arty, claustrophobic, and vastly entertaining. Created by former comedy writer Stephen Knight, the six-part series is loosely grounded in 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 the trenches, many bringing their weapons with them. There was a concern that gangsters and revolutionaries would join forces, threatening an industrial landscape of constant strife.

“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 textbook history.