Yes, it’s OTT, but the show is still a masterclass in style and substance
Television First-look Review Peaky Blinders BBC One ★★★★★
‘Since we last met,” said Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby midway through the opener of the final series of Peaky Blinders, “I’ve become a better man.”
That is debatable. On the one hand Tommy has given up the booze, become, on the outside at least, a calmer, more reasonable person, like he’d been to a Wellness Centre and done a bit of conscious breathing. On the other hand he’s still a dab hand with a switchblade. If anything, laying off the whisky has brought to Tommy a clarity of mind that has taken his ability to play 3D chess with his many dangerous opponents to George Smiley levels.
The first part of the final series of the Birmingham-based period gangster drama took great pains to lay out who those dangerous opponents are. The show has always been a Western at heart, and so it’s important to establish who – if Tommy Shelby is the gruff antihero – are his adversaries?
Series six begins with a signature Peaky time jump, four years on to 1933 and the end of prohibition. We land on Miquelon Island, a French territory in Newfoundland, with the bootleg whisky trade winding up and Tommy looking to replace one illicit business with another, opium. This brings him into conflict with Michael (Finn Cole) who’s been living and working with the Americans on whose lawns Tommy wants to park his tanks. It also puts him up against Gina’s (Anya Taylor-joy) uncle Jack Nelson, the East Coast Mr Big. And so once again it looks as if series six is going to be a tale of Tommy moving up another league, taking
on the big boys and learning his limitations.
You don’t have to be a connoisseur of Westerns to see that Peaky Blinders follows a well-established narrative. You’re rooting for Tommy Shelby even as you’re appalled by the things he does, and it’s this dissonance that creates tension. There is even a scene here where Tommy walks into a shady saloon bar and everyone goes quiet. Try watching that without whistling some Ennio Morricone.
The trick that writer Steven Knight has pulled off for this final season is to balance the character study – about a man with PTSD from the First World War slowly working out that he has that condition – with finding a place in history’s hard shoulder (Miquelon Island) that allows him to come at the factual moment from an oblique angle. It’s clever – both predictable and yet exciting at the same time.
To the usual Peaky objection – that it’s a little bit bombastic – well, guilty as charged. In this episode alone there’s Cillian Murphy, an Irishman, speaking French in a Brummie accent; there’s
music from Joy Division, poetry from William Blake and enough slow-motion strutting to make you think your telly’s gone funny. The point is that this is a stylised saga that is meant to be larger than life; a show that has prided itself on its showmanship.
With that in mind, there’s also a swagger to the direction and the writing born out of five series in which Peaky has gone, like Tommy Shelby, from the little show on BBC2 that everyone thought was a bit OTT to a cultural phenomenon that has men the world over sporting skin fades, fob watches and worsted trousers (see feature above).
This feeling of complete selfassurance extends to how the series deals with the absence of Aunt Polly, Tommy’s de facto mother. Helen Mccrory died last spring, and while I won’t tell you what happens, rest assured that the final series is a worthy testament to this outstanding actress, and the character she created.