Set
in Birmingham, Northern England, in the aftermath of the First World War,
season one of the hit BBC TV series, Peaky
Blinders, shows glimpses of greatness. Glimpses
- not quite full-blown TV greatness. But 'Blinders has certainly shown enough to leave audiences hanging out for more in season
two.
The
leader of the Peaky Blinders is Tommy
Shelby, played by Cillian Murphy, he of the chiseled cheekbones and piercing blue eyes, a Hollywood star who has appeared in
blockbuster movies and arthouse films alike, including Christopher Nolan’s Batman reboot and Inception, Ken Loach’s Cannes Palme D’or winner The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Danny
Boyle’s seminal zombie film 28 Days Later.
 | |
| * Cillian Murphy's best Michael Corleone pose. |
Tommy
Shelby is the leader of the crime family, rounded out by his dim-witted
older brother Arthur, younger sibling John and, the heart of the family, Aunty
Pollyanna Shelby. Along with the usual a bevvy of rough-neck, northerner goons.
Aunt
Polly and the Shelby women, including Tommy’s sister Ada, successfully
maintained the family business – special price bookmaking – whilst the brothers
served King and Country fighting the Hun in France during the Great War. But
now that Tommy and his brothers have returned, Tommy wastes no time in
reasserting control of their fledgling business and begins hastily and
ruthlessly building the small family operation into an empire. This includes
seizing the local pub, The Garrison,
at gunpoint, making the owner ‘an offer he couldn’t refuse’, rigging
horse-races, fighting gypsy’s, challenging bookie boss Billy Kimber and other
assorted scallywag behaviour.
Sound
familiar? The war hero returning home to lead his crime family into legitimate
business, coupled with tension between he and his elder brother, clearly a nod
to Michael and Fredo Corleone in The
Godfather films.
The
series also looks familiar and is
most obviously inspired by HBO’s Boardwalk
Empire, especially because of its early 1900’s time period and wardrobe,
the dapper caps, overcoats, pin-striped suits and well-pressed shirts they all
wear. And as we learn, even the oriental laundromat is a front for a racket.
(Think Mr. Woo in Deadwood and the
Korean linen service and massage parlours in The Sopranos!)
Why
they are called the Peaky Blinders
and not the Shelby Gang, apart from sounding really bloody cool, is never
properly explained. But it may have something to do with the Peaky Blinders'
weapon of choice; razor blades sewn into the visors and peaks of their caps.
A ‘peaky blinder’; a hat you can slash someone’s eyeballs out with! This is an
ingenious trademark weapon, worthy of a cult comic book hero! But sadly, we
only see the Peaky Blinders carving it
up with their caps a couple of times. I would have loved to have seen the naff
blades put to more use. That being said, every time one of the gang confronts
an enemy, or even just takes their cap off being gentlemanly, is a successful
technique in ramping up audience tension, hoping that they unleash a hat-slash
across the face of an adversary!
Before
we have even met Thomas Shelby and his brothers, a certain tone and feel is set
immediately by the theme song, the Nick Cave classic Red Right Hand (1994). The song has been used in films and commercials
before, The X-Files feature film and a
recent ad campaign promoting the wine region of South Australia.
 |
| *Nick Cave's 'Red Right Hand'. |
Red Right Hand is an inspired choice. Nick
Cave’s music has always had a cinematic quality because of the stories he tells
through his lyrics and the emotions and atmosphere he conjures up. A good theme
song can really hook you into a series, is something an audience can grow to
love and the song itself can become an icon of pop culture (thinking again of The Sopranos and The Wire’s iconic theme songs). The series itself even looks and
feels like something Cave, the musician-come-celebrated-author-screenwriter (The Proposition, Lawless) could have conceived, known for writing about outlaws, hillbilly’s
and having a knack for ‘ye olde’ dialogue. In fact, if it weren’t for Googling
him, I could have almost been convinced that Peaky Blinders creator and showrunner, Steven Knight, was actually Mr. Nick Cave writing under
a pseudonym! No disrespect intended to Steven Knight’s talents. And I would not
at all be surprised if we did indeed, sometime in the future, see a Peaky Blinders episode by ‘guest’ writer
Mr. Nick Cave – maybe one of the perks of the series using his Red Right Hand as their theme.
But
I digress…
The actual
plot that thrusts Tommy Shelby and his Peaky
Blinders on their season trajectory is the heist of a shipment of machine
guns that come into their possession, stolen in transit from the B.S.A
armaments factory. B.S.A being the actual Birmingham
Small Arms company, who would later go on to famously manufacture the BSA motorcycle! (When I think B.S.A, I
cannot help but recall George Michael’s leather jacket in the 80’s hit music
video Faith!)
The
machine guns themselves are essentially a ‘McGuffin’; a plot device to drive
the story (like the suitcase in Pulp
Fiction.) With fears that the machine guns could fall into the hands of
terrorists like the I.R.A or revolutionary Communist agitators like Tommy’s
best mate Freddy Thorn, Minister of Defence, Sir Winston Churchill, sends Inspector
Campbell, played by Sam Neil, to Birmingham to recover the guns. (This is
another aspect of the series I enjoy – how the writers and in particular the
art department have worked hard to reflect the true, gritty, grimy, smoky,
soot-laden lifestyle of Birmingham in 1919, with real historical figures like Sir
Winston Churchill appearing as a character on the fringes of the fictionalised Peaky Blinders plot and King George and
the politics of the era regularly being referenced.)
 |
| *Put that in your pipe & smoke it - Sam Neill |
Enter
Inspector Chester Campbell, Tommy Shelby’s nemesis. Sam Neill is excellent as
the corrupt, malicious, sometimes even pathetic, double-crossing Inspector
Campbell. It is refreshing to see Sam Neill play such a dark character and his
role is one of the most engaging of the series.
Inspector
Campbell is accompanied by a young lady friend, Special Agent Grace Burgess,
played by blonde-beauty Annabell Wallis. Enter Tommy Shelby’s love interest! The
young ‘spy’ integrates herself into the local ghetto community, ingratiates
herself with the Shelby family (all except for the suspicious Polly),
infiltrating the Peaky Blinders as a
barmaid, bookkeeper and eventually, Tommy’s bed-mate lover.
Peaky Blinders has all the elements in place
to ensure success; stunning performances from a talented ensemble cast, an impeccable
art department that has created an authentic-feeling early 1900’s look, all
contradicted by a killer contemporary rock soundtrack featuring music by The White Stripes, Tom Waits, The Raconteurs
and, as previously mentioned, Nick Cave
& The Bad Seeds, the overall production qualities making Peaky Blinders ‘cinema on TV’.
Whether
or not Peaky Blinders can reach the same lofty heights of other ‘cinema on TV’ series
like The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and
Game of Thrones – remains to be seen.
What
makes those dramas great is, primarily, the writer’s willingness to take risks
and be bold, pulling the trigger and killing off a central character when the
plot demanded it, even more so when that character had become beloved by the
audience, the emotional response and pay off being all the more intense,
gut-wrenching and overall dramatic.
If
there is one fault with Peaky Blinders,
for a TV show about gangsters, with undercover agents, double-crosses and bloody
turf wars, the body count is unusually low.
This
may be attributed to a few things;
1) Trying
to appeal to a wider demographic, opting for a ‘love-plot’ over the harsh and
brutal gangster reality in the chase for higher ratings.
2) Sometimes
it feels like writers fall in love with their characters, hence their
reluctance to have them bumped off / whacked, even when the plotting suggests,
no demands, that they deserve to die!
3) Or
maybe they are just being true and authentic to the Birmingham death register and
murder or death by a bloody gang war just wasn’t as common as it were in say,
1920’s Atlantic City, as in Boardwalk Empire. Sure, hospitals must have done a
lot of stitching up of blade wounds from caps sewn with razors, but when your
major plot device involves a shipment of machine guns you would at least expect
there to be some sort of body count from said artillery!
It
is also worth noting that most TV series’, even those in the rarefied air as those
previously mentioned classics, tend to play it safe in their first season,
often not finding their true tone and style until seasons two to three.
Creator’s and Producers have to wrap up all plot lines and tie up any loose
threads with the season one finale, as they don’t know if the series will be
renewed by the broadcaster, a second season all dependent upon ratings and how
well the first season is critically received.
However,
the good news is, there is already a second season of Peaky Blinders to be devoured (currently available on Netflix and
coming soon to ABC2) and a third season currently in production as of October
2015.
At
the risk of sounding like a blood-thirsty, gypsy, mercenary goon, one can only
hope that, in seasons two and three, to ramp up the dramatic tension, the
writers decide to pull the trigger and slit the throats of those that stand in
the way of Tommy Shelby and his Peaky
Blinders, as they expand their business empire south, inevitably
towards old London town.
The
other exciting news is, season two of the Peaky
Blinders welcomes another bona-fide British Hollywood superstar to the cast,
Tom Hardy (most recently seen as Mad Max in
Fury Road). So, it may be fair to
assume that the Peaky’s will crank things up a few notches and deliver us a
blinder!
 |
| * 'Did you piss in my cup?' Cillian Murphy to Tom Hardy in S02 of Peaky Blinders. |
(*Peaky Blinders is on ABC2 Monday nights
at 9:20pm then repeated on Tuesday nights at 11:30pm, available for streaming
on ABC I-View and both Seasons 1 – 2 on
Netflix.)
(*Images ripped & rerpoduced without permission.)
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