EFFING BRILLIANT BLINDERS
Show that keeps you off balance with its approach and surprising stars is lighting up screens again, writes
It’s that time of the year and, no, I’m not talking about flashing lights, tinsel and the dulcet tones of Bing Crosby and Dean Martin crooning platitudes about Santa. I’m talking about the time of year when for six intense but exhilarating weeks the television universe becomes firmly the property of the Peaky Blinders. We’re four episodes in but nothing quite encapsulates the pleasures of Steven Knight’s historical but not quite historically accurate show as the final minutes of the second episode of season four. A bristling, smirking, neck-tattooed, immaculately dressed Adrien Brody walks into the offices of a steely blue-eyed, highcheek-boned Cillian Murphy and in his best Marlon-Brando-as-Vito-Corleone impression delivers a lesson about suits and the men who make them.
“I heard you dress well, Mr Shelby,” says Brody while opening his suit to show off the label of his uncle’s tailoring shop, “but now I see not so well as me,” he continues, a toothpick dangling seemingly precariously from his gritted teeth as Murphy coolly observes his adversary behind his inscrutable baby blues.
The encounter ends with Brody’s Luca Changretta and Murphy’s Tommy Shelby making a gentlemen’s agreement to exclude women, children and innocent bystanders from the inevitable body count that will arise from their vendetta.
Then Shelby quietly welcomes his adversary to Birmingham and we hear the gruff tones of Johnny Cash singing Further on up the Road rise on the soundtrack.
“Where the road is dark and the seed is sowed/Where the gun is cocked and the bullet’s cold/Where the miles are marked in the blood and gold/I’ll meet you further on up the road” croaks the man in black in a perfect but anachronistic encapsulation of what we might expect from the remainder of this season’s typical but also never-quite-surewhat-might-happen-next pitting of paterfamilias Tommy against those who seek to topple his empire and the Shelby family.
Thanks to the inclusion of its previous three seasons on the Netflix platform, Knight’s BBC show has grown a legion of dedicated followers around the world.
Its combination of strong performances, pleasantly surprising and full-of-relish cameos by recognised superstar actors like Brody and Tom Hardy (whose reappearance as East End London Jewish gangster Alfie Solomons is eagerly awaited) combined with a killer soundtrack featuring the likes of Nick Cave, Tom Waits, PJ Harvey and The White Stripes, and a tight six-episode-per-season storyline, have made it a satisfyingly stylish and dramatically fulfilling demonstration of the power of the crime-story genre in the hands of a clear-eyed show creator who knows that what we’re watching is a carefully created and curated five act/season family saga.
The premise for each season is essentially the same – outside forces seeking revenge or destruction of the Shelby family will attempt to destroy the empire and may leave some beloved characters dead in their wake.
However, none of them quite have the smarts or ruthless dedication and cunning possessed by Tommy, the shell-shocked World War 1 veteran who means to combine the street smarts represented by the deadly razor blades concealed in his peak cap with a class-leaping ambition to carve the names of the Peaky Blinders in the history books, from Birmingham to the halls of Westminster.
Whether or not Luca Changretta, like many of those who have preceded him, will be alive or dead in two weeks remains to be seen, but whatever the outcome you can be sure that we’re sitting here on the edge of our seats rooting for the morally ambiguous Tommy to ensure that by whatever means necessary — Gypsy spells, hidden deals or deeply serious coin tosses — he succeeds in ensuring that, like the man in black, he’s the one who’ll be seeing you and your army, “further on down the road”.
L