Move over, Cap’n Ross — there’s another brooding hero in town

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS WEEKEND TV Peaky Blinders HHHHI A Black And White Killing HHHII

Anyone switching on to watch Poldark would have been left feeling puzzled. our 9pm hero still rode a noble stallion, silhouetted against a stormy skyline — but instead of dismounting and throwing himself into Demelza’s arms, he lit a cigarette and stepped into a red telephone kiosk.

The ‘Cap’n’ and gangster Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) are both taciturn men, it’s true, who could brood for Britain. But there are precious few other similarities between the romantic Cornish saga and Peaky Blinders (BBC1).

Poldark was shunted to an earlier slot, to make way for the BBC1 debut of this violent Twenties saga of crime and family.

That was an indignity for Master Ross, who was once monarch of the Sunday night ratings. But when you’re over, you’re over.

Peaky Blinders, based tenuously on a real-life mob of small-time racketeers in Birmingham after World War I, began on BBC2 six years ago as a cultish experiment.

I couldn’t fathom it during series one: the combination of howling blues guitar, Birmingham slums, bone-mashing gore and razor-sharp costumes was incomprehensible.

But the penny dropped halfway through its second series. you don’t just watch this show, you have to tumble headlong into it and submit to the freefall. Tommy

may now be a powerful businessman and Labour MP instead of a backstreet bookie, but he’s still numbing the trauma of the trenches with opium and strong spirits.

His grip on reality is a rictus claw, part determination and part rigor mortis.

So when he rides his horse across a wasteland of smouldering cinders to a phonebox with an electric light set in a gold ceiling rose, to the sound of a clanging bell and nick Cave’s sonorous theme song, we don’t need to question it. That’s simply how reality seems to Tommy Shelby MP.

He doesn’t carry the show on his own, far from it. Aidan Gillen plays a gypsy boss, his every line a quip, who appeared in just a couple of scenes but did get to smash through a wall and gun down a Chinese pimp.

Sophie Rundle, simpering wetly as the love interest in Gentleman Jack not many Sundays ago, is the cool-headed sister, Ad a, who stands up to her brother’s more suicidal schemes, and Helen McCrory is Aunt Polly, whose power of second sight is apparently not dimmed by a pair of very un-Twenties but undeniably fabulous sunglasses.

Aunt Polly is so clairvoyant that she even refers to the Academy Awards as the oscars — in 1929, about five years before the nickname first appeared in print. It’s just a pity she didn’t foresee the Wall Street Crash as well.

Gangland was the theme for journalist Mobeen Azhar too, as he investigated a murder in Portland, oregon — a liberalLeftie paradise for vegans and dope smokers, but also a base for more than 20 white supremacist factions — in A Black and White Killing: The Case That Shook America (BBC2).

Mobeen made his name with a rockumentary about the late artist Prince, but his recent programmes have concentrated on race hate. In his interviews he cultivates a deadpan calm, like Louis Theroux on diazepam.

It disconcerts the racists that he confronts: they make extreme comments, hoping to provoke hysteria, and are met instead with an inscrutable stare . . . which only makes them talk even more.

It’s a smart technique, but he hasn’t yet learned to mask his fashionista side. Chatting to an American ex-nazi, he was thrilled to learn the former thug used to wear Dr Martens boots.

Mobeen flashed his own Docs in delight. ‘Were they oxblood like mine?’ he asked.