Back with all guns blazing ... it’s Peaky Blinders versus Al Capone
Goodbye Wyat t earp, hello Al Capone. The gipsy clan of Peaky Blinders ( bbC2) have shaken off the dust of the Wild West and embraced the world of the hoodlum.
Italian-American gangsters from the New york Mafia were on their heels as this outrageously stylish Twenties drama returned — leaping from behind bales of hay to open up with Tommy-guns.
This was the St Valentine’s day Massacre, refought in the sleepy lanes of rural england.
Peaky blinders, which seemed such a mismatched hybrid when it launched four years ago, has carved out its own genre.
We now believe in its Romany molls, its High Street gunfights, its UK prohibition and race wars and crime lords . . . all in swaggering slow-motion, set to a spinechilling soundtrack of blues-rock.
What began as an incongruous hotchpotch has become t he richest, darkest confection on television. It relishes gore: the climactic scene, in the kitchens of kingpin Tommy Shelby’s stately home, was steeped in it.
A terrified chef dripping with goose entrails backed away from the boss’s embrace, pleading that he had blood on his hands.
‘So have I,’ smiled Tommy (Cillian Murphy). That encounter ended with a man slumped across a butcher’s table — a billhook in his neck and a bullet in his head. by now Tommy looked like he’d been swimming in offal.
drenches of intense colour are the trademark of this series. At first, it was eruptions of flame from the workshops of birmingham, billowing like bomb blasts onto the streets where men rode on horses and harlots flashed their petticoats.
Later, as Tommy and his family moved among the corrupt aristocracy, the flames were replaced by the dazzle of diamonds. but now, too rich and notorious even for the highest society, the Shelbys are living in isolation — estranged from each other and hiding from the world.
That gave us some marvellous vignettes. Tommy’s psychotic younger brother, John (Joe Cole), went hunting pheasants on Christmas eve with a six-shooter. Aunt Polly (Helen McCrory), fuelled by whisky and phials of cocaine, talked to the ghosts of children.
only Tommy seemed to live in the open, running his sweatshop factories and lounging around the boardroom in a pair of wirerimmed specs that gave him the look of Heinrich Himmler.
A f emale union convenor (Charlie Murphy) dared confront him, glowing with indignation like a feminist from the future when Tommy called her ‘sweetheart’. Let’s see how long her principles withstand his brutal charms . . .assuming any of the Shelbys survive those mobsters with machine guns.
A killer just as callous and deadly was at large in The Secret Life Of The Zoo (C4). Ripley the jewel wasp was hunting for a place to lay her single egg, and she was a fussy mother.
Finally she settled on a juicy cockroach, dubbed Karl by the keepers. Paralysing him with a couple of jabs of venom, she chopped off his antennae and guzzled his blood before inserting her egg into his abdomen.
Karl was still alive, but he was helpless as Ripley dragged him into her burrow and walled him in. ‘Ripley’, of course, is the heroine in the Alien movies.
When her baby munched her way out of Karl’s body, it wasn’t hard to see why the keepers chose that name.
Cuter moments were provided with the birth of a baby black rhino. but this series wisely refuses to be too cuddly.
There are plenty of adorable animal shows: Secret Life retains a bit of bite.