Last night on television Michael Hogan Peaky Blinders swaggers from strength to strength
Blimey, those Billy Boys certainly mean business. The second episode of period crime yarn (BBC One) saw a deadly new threat arrive in the form of the Glasgow Protestant razor gang, who announced themselves in song.
“Hello, hello/we are the Billy Boys/ We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood/surrender or you’ll die” rang out through the woods before they coldly crucified and killed gipsy boxer Bonnie Gold (Jack Rowan), leaving his broken-hearted, broken-armed father Aberama (Aidan Gillen) barely alive to tell the tale.
Unfolding in a mist-shrouded forest, it was a stunning scene, cinematically shot and stomach-knottingly tense. Peaky Blinders has always been visually ambitious but with its promotion from BBC Two to BBC One for this fifth series, it seems to have gone up another gear.
Another case in point was the opening sequence, in which Brummie kingpin Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy) realised the Billy Boys had laid a lethal minefield in the grounds of his country estate. Shelby called upon his First World War experience to painstakingly pick his way through it, before using an aptly named
Tommy gun to explode the devices in a swell of slow-motion fireballs, billowing smoke and falling mud. “Yes,” writer Steven Knight seemed to be saying, “the Blinders are back with a bang all right.”
No wonder Shelby was growing paranoid: “People are starting to circle,” he said. “Who wants to take my throne?” As well as the Billy Boys heading south, the IRA were on the phone, the Metropolitan police were sniffing around and sinister politician Oswald Mosley (a ’tache-twirling turn from Sam Claflin) had a proposition for him. Even the Peaky wives, no mere gangster’s molls, were turning against him. Shelby’s mental state wasn’t helped by his escalating drug habit and dreams of black cats, meaning a traitor was close by.
Having watched this defiantly regional drama grow from cult concern to mainstream phenomenon, its loyal fans have a sense of ownership and pride. Americans tend to have the monopoly on mythologising their more colourful working-class history, so it’s refreshing to see a home-grown show beating them at their own game.
Peaky Blinders isn’t to everybody’s taste. It’s stylistically self-conscious, convoluted for newcomers to follow, full of thick accents and mumbled threats – not to mention plentiful swearing and bloodshed. For devotees, though, it goes from strength to strength with exhilarating swagger.
The seemingly liberal but deeply troubled American city of Portland, Oregon, hit the headlines again last week following confrontations between a far-right rally and anti-fascist demonstrators. Thus it seemed an apposite time to air A Black and White Killing: The Case The Shook America (BBC Two), a true-crime two-parter about a racially charged murder case which concluded last night.
In 2016, outside a Portland convenience store, a member of a white supremacist gang ran over and killed a young black man. CCTV footage of the red Jeep chasing down the fleeing pedestrian went viral, reverberating across America – not just because of the incident’s brutality but because of the question at its core. Did Russel Courtier, an ex-convict with the logo of white supremacist prison gang European Kindred on his baseball cap and tattooed on his leg, murder Larnell Bruce because he was black?
Documentarian Mobeen Azhar, a cool-headed and slightly hangdog screen presence, headed to Portland to take the temperature of America’s race war, meet people on both sides of the divide and sit in on Courtier’s trial, which had all the plot twists of a work of fiction. Azhar was calm and scrupulously fair towards both sides.
First we saw damning footage of Courtier using the N-word. Sympathies swung the other way when we learned that Bruce was carrying a machete that fateful night. There was even a jaw-dropping piece of police incompetence, with investigators making a basic mathematical error and miscalculating the Jeep’s speed at impact.
Tension mounted. After three days of deliberations, the jury’s verdict was delivered. Courtier was found guilty and sentenced to 28 years in East Oregon Correctional Facility – where European Kindred, ironically, has a strong presence.
Peaky Blinders ★★★★★
A Black and White Killing: The Case That Shook America ★★★