TelevisionAcademy.com 77mangle [laundry wringer] and a fag [cigarette] hanging out of my
mouth, wondering when the boys would come home. Little did I
know.” Polly is not only the family’s matriarch, she’s also Tommy’s
second-in-command and his most trusted confidante.
She recalls that Knight came to her house in North London
and explained the tone he was looking for. “He wanted this epic
quality that the Americans do so well. We just don’t do it. But
nobody knew what it was going to be until we saw it. We thought
this was going to be period. Instead it was, ‘What the hell? Jack
White is doing the music?’”
“It was really confident in its identity from the beginning,”
Murphy says. “British television had often been more about
the aristocracy, less so these types of men between the wars.
They were spat out from the First War and just had to fucking
make do. Steven basically took a part of history that hasn’t been
dramatized very much on television and said, ‘Okay, I could do
something with that.’”
ne of the things Knight did was make the show
soundlikenoother:theverymodernsoundtrack
hasbecomeoneof PeakyBlinders’scalling
cards. Collectively it makes for a solid gold
Spotify indie/alternative playlist, taking in
everything from Nick Cave to the White Stripes,
PJ Harvey, Arctic Monkeys, Leonard Cohen and,inseason
three, some of David Bowie’s last music. A fan of the show, Bowie gave Knight
early access to Blackstar, which was released just days before his death in
January 2016.
“It was so beautiful and poignant and moving that we got the last
Blackstar material and that he had asked for that to happen,” says Murphy,
an ardent music fan who hosts his own radio show in the UK. “That was really
moving for somebody like me — just very overwhelming.”
Peaky also looks different from other shows. McCrory recalls her first
time on the Garrison Lane set, home turf for the gang in Birmingham’s Small
Heath area. “When we first filmed on it, it had this strange glow about the
bricks. I asked the production designer what he’d done with the walls. He said,
‘Okay... we painted them brown and then purple and then black and then blue
and then purple again, and then I stained them with a wood varnish.’ You go,
‘Right. Where?’ He said, ‘The whole street. And the roof, and the cobbles. And
the pavement.’ That’s why it looks amazing — it’s the craftsmanship. This is a
show made by artists, from top to bottom.”
It’s clear that the Peaky cast and crew enjoy being outsiders, part of
a show that may lack the vast resources of a premium cable or streaming
drama yet has nonetheless become the people’s champ.
“The budget is far less than it should be,” Murphy says. “Therefore, by
necessity, you have to be clever in your design, because you can’t spend a
shitload of money on a massive set. You have to be very creative in the way
you move the camera and the way you light and the way you design. You get
to bring new talented people who go, ‘Right, we don’t have the budget of big
American shows, but we’re going to do it, just by being more imaginative.’
And they have: it looks like it’s got double its actual budget, which is a brilliant
achievement for all the crew.”
But away from the aesthetics and the soundtrack, it’s storytelling that
underpins the show’s success. What Knight has done, over four seasons, is
to take familiar gangster tropes — the Shelbys start small amid the fallout
from the First World War, become powerful, take new territory, get rich and
then are challenged by competing families — and knit in real characters and
incidents from British history. You get shootouts, explosions, violence and
sex, but also a sophisticated, sometimes subtle reflection of the politics and
history that defined the period.
“Each season,” Knight says, “I’ll pick the year it’s starting, pick a
significant date or event and say, ‘Okay, that’s what’s happening to this family.
How are they going to react?’ I’ve been fortunate, in that history gives me
these fantastic things and moments. Especially between the wars, there’s all
this stuff going on: this was the time when the very beginnings of fascism
were coming out — but from a really odd direction: from the left. That’s where
Tommy is, that’s his territory. So I want to explore how that is affecting him,
and affecting the society around him as well.”
Season five sees Tommy Shelby become a member of the British
Parliament, where he meets a young Oswald Mosley, played by The Hunger
Games’sSamClaflin.Inreallife,Mosleywouldgoontobecometheleaderof
thefar-rightBritishUnionofFascists.Given that the season begins with the
Wall Street crash of 1929 and goes on to show how a global financial crisis
drove society and politics to dangerous extremes, the parallels between then
and now should be obvious.
“Weirdly, coincidentally, the ’30s and now have a lot in common,” Knight
says. “But I think if you’re going to write anything at all, you want to consider the
resonances for the present day. In seasons one and two, when I was looking at
Tommy’s post-traumatic stress after the First World War, a lot of that came
from research I was doing on a different project with Royal Marines who’d come
back from Afghanistan, talking to them about how they were feeling.”uch of the show is shot outside of Birmingham, because
significant areas of that city were lost to German bombs
during the Second World War. On set at the grand City Hall
in Bradford, West Yorkshire, Claflin and Murphy are filming a
scene in the splendid surrounds of Shelby’s parliamentary
office, which is dominated by a large portrait of the man
himself. Murphy sits behind a mahogany desk in a plush
leather chair, mulling over Mosley’s suggestion that they join forces to control
the whole country. Against all odds, the boy from the streets of Birmingham
has made it to the very top.
And so has Peaky Blinders: last year the show won Best Drama at the
BAFTA Awards in the UK. “It came to the point that BAFTA could no longer
ignore us,” McCrory says. “Usually you have to be put forward and have run a
huge campaign. We’ve come at it the other way round. The people have taken
this show to the profession.”Helen McCrory as
Aunt Polly