The criminally addictive Peaky Blinders
The bizarre name given to a renowned youth gang in England, and currently to one of the BBC ’s most effective crime programs, comes from a weapon that the gang, in its earliest days, was said to have invented.
As the not- quite- authentic story goes, Birmingham mobs wore flat woollen caps in the late 19th century, a sign of their proud working- class background. They stitched razor blades to the peaks of their caps, which they could hurl at an enemy in a fight. In the unlikely event of the blades connecting with the eyes of the enemy, he would be blinded.
Thus arose the name Peaky Blinders, which the gang adopted with pride and which the BBC has given to its latest venture in “historical fiction.” The original Peaky Blinders faded away around 1930, leaving only a name that was often attached to would-be tough guys. In 2013 the writer Steven Knight revived them as a TV series, placing them in the 1920s and 1930s. Four seasons were produced; now they are showing us their fifth.
The program is richly successful. The characters are well rounded, the settings and costumes credible, the dialogue effective.
The actors pay their debt to history by wearing the signature outfit of the originals: Tailored jackets, lapel overcoats, button waistcoats, silk scarves, bell- bottom trousers, leather boots and, of course, peaked flat caps. Like most of the men in the gang, they wear their hair Blinder style — heavy on the top, but severely shaven on the sides.
The producers make this fiction historical by embracing actual events and famous people. One true-life notable who turns up this season is Sir Oswald Mosley, the MP of a constituency near the country home of the Blinders. He’s famously an admirer of Hitler and the leader of the British Union of Fascists, a position that got him jailed early in the war. Sir Oswald (he inherited the “Sir”) is portrayed as a hightoned gentleman. He wants the Peaky Blinders to join his cause.
The Blinders and the local Shelby family have united for business as the Shelby Company Limited. They assemble automobiles and send them to America, with Shelby- made liquor hidden in them to assuage the ravages of Prohibition.
The combined gang and business is headed by Tommy Shelby, played with exquisite tension by Cillian Murphy. Presumably, Tommy was assigned this role because he’s the not only the cleverest but also the most vicious of the Blinders. He spends much of his time brooding in his office, no doubt dreaming about his next atrocity. The TV audience requires patience, but when he acts he becomes a killing machine. Like all the Shelby men, except the youngest, he served in the trenches of the First World War. In a 2019 assessment, they suffer acute PTSD that they try to alleviate with random sex, liquor and cocaine.
Tommy chairs the meetings of senior Blinders and
characters are well rounded, the settings and costumes credible, the dialogue effective.
often has bad news to share. In Season 3 one of their men has killed a visiting member of the American Mafia, and revenge is on the way. A platoon- sized detachment of mafioso is coming from New York to obliterate the entire Blinders family. Once that threat is eliminated, the Shelby family’s carefully invested fortune is largely wiped out by the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
They must begin again. That will involve (as a Peaky historian noted) bookmaking, assault, extortion, fraud, murder, fencing, hooliganism, bribery, smuggling, hijacking and robbery, or some combination of those.
Knight, creator and author of the series, says he imagined it as a drama about a family between the two wars. He saw it as ending with the first air raid siren in Birmingham on June 25, 1940. That will take seven seasons in total, with the sixth already in production. I’ll happily wait for all of them.