Judgment day for the Brummie GODFATHER
As Peaky Blinders reaches its final series, will the crime kingpins go out with all guns blazing?
Though fans will be ecstatic as Peaky Blinders struts back across our screens for the first time since 2019, it’s a bittersweet moment. Not only have the makers said that this sixth series will be the last, but it’s also the first without fearsome crime-world matriarch Polly, after the death of actress Helen McCrory aged only 52 last year.
Yet still there is so much coming up in these final six episodes, following an incredible run that began when the show emerged unheralded on BBC2 in 2013 and almost immediately grabbed a cult following.
The saga of Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy, left with Natasha O’Keeffe) and his gang was a period drama unlike any seen before on British TV, distinguished by tough Brummie accents, a hard-rock soundtrack and a much imitated fashion style.
Though the setting was Birmingham between the wars, the noirish style was redolent of the best kind of Hollywood westerns. With a brilliant script by creator Steven Knight and a starry cast featuring McCrory, as well as
Tom Hardy and Sam Neill, before long the show won a Bafta for best drama, along with ratings that demanded a switch to BBC1.
The story now resumes four years on from the events of season five, in 1933. Murphy remains as mesmerising as ever as crime kingpin Shelby, a man capable of acts of unspeakable violence but still driven by his own moral code.
He and his underlings face greater dangers than ever as they branch out into selling opium in the US after the end of the Prohibition era. They must also deal with the growing menace of Oswald Mosley and his fascist bully boys, which they faced in season five, plus there’s the chilling threat of the IRA.
We can look forward to the return of Hardy as the strangely charismatic Jewish gangster Alfie Solomons, plus the brilliant Stephen Graham in a role that is for now mysterious, barring a brief trailer in which his character tells Tommy Shelby with dramatic significance: ‘I hear there are some men here from Birmingham looking for me.’
Whether Shelby or any of the other characters will be left alive in the violent world they inhabit at the end of the series is impossible to say. What’s certain is that the show will leave a moodily shadowy legacy as a television classic for many years to come.