Crime and the Criminal #7: Fare Thee Well, Peaky Fookin' Blinders
British television is boring. With one exception.
Warning: spoilers ahead
British television is the worst. They’re still showing the same rubbish they did when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s: Dr. Who, University Challenge, East Enders, Blue Peter, Emmerdale Farm, and Coronation Street, which last year celebrated its 10,000th episode.
And don’t get me started on the endless stream of programs about mundane pastimes such as baking, pottery, sewing, glass-blowing, vegetable gardening, even competitive flower arranging, clogging up the schedule.
How many programs about restoring antiques can one person watch?
As one wag put it: “It’s like your dead grandparents have risen from the grave and taken over TV.”
Even crime shows—a genre where critics say the British excel—are kind of boring because British crime is kind of boring, lacking, as it does, the cinematic quality of Mexican crime or American crime.
Watching scenes of detectives combing through CCTV footage doesn’t have the same dramatic impact as shoot-outs between cops and narcos.
With recent series like Mare of Easttown, Yellowjackets, and the exquisitely poignant Station Eleven, the Golden Age of Television that started two decades ago with The Sopranos and The Wire is still ongoing in America, whereas in Britain, it never got started.
There is, however, one exception: Peaky Blinders, the period crime drama for people who hate period dramas that ended its six season run last Sunday.
Set between the two world wars, the show tracked the rise of the Shelby crime family, a fictional Romani clan loosely based on the Peaky Blinders, a real gang active in Birmingham, England in the 1890s.
Right from the start, Peaky Blinders was different.
The opening scene of the first episode in which the show’s main protagonist, Thomas Shelby, rides into view on a black horse like a cowboy who has traded his Stetson for a flat cap was a deliberate nod to the American westerns that inspired the show’s creator, Steven Knight, even more than classic Hollywood gangster movies
Knight based the show on the stories his older relatives told about local criminals while he was growing up in Small Heath, a working-class neighborhood in Birmingham.
But instead of portraying them as petty street thugs, he wanted to mythologize them in much the same way as American westerns mythologized cowboys.
“[Think of] westerns, where they’re telling the story of 19th-century agricultural laborers, cowboys,” he told History Extra. “These are people who were employed to herd cows from one place to another, and their story has become [part of] the mythology of the western world. Americans have done that to something mundane.”
And then there were the show’s visuals. Most British TV programs look like producers made them with whatever loose change they found down the back of their couch. Some TikTok videos have better production values. By contrast, Peaky Blinders looked stunning: industrial Birmingham reimagined as a steampunk version of Blade Runner.
Equally audacious was the show’s dark and brooding soundtrack. Instead of using an orchestral score or popular music from the 1920s, Peaky Blinders featured mostly contemporary alternative rock musicians, including Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey, Anna Calvi and Radiohead, all carefully curated to fit the mood of the show and the emotional state of the characters.
While unmistakingly American in style, the show remained very British in outlook, as evidenced by its emphasis on social class.
In a time when social mobility is stagnant in Britain and class privilege is as entrenched as ever, part of the appeal of Peaky Blinders was that it offered an inspiring tale: Tommy Shelby’s climb to the top of British society as a successful businessman and Member of Parliament, albeit one who murders his enemies and brokers multi-ton heroin deals with American gangsters.
When a factory manager asked Shelby did he ever consider if the communists came to power, he would be shot as a class traitor, he replied: “I am not a traitor to my class. I am just an extreme example of what a working man can achieve.”
“With Peaky, I wanted to show that working-class characters could have agency and ambition, that they weren’t just underlings,” Steven Knight told the New Statesman, calling the show he created “an aspirational show about aspirational people.”
But Tommy soon finds upward mobility has a downside. He struggles to gain acceptance among the elites who use him to carry out criminal deeds on their behalf or spy on their opponents. At several points in the show, the psychic stress of his new life drives him to contemplate suicide. Tommy eventually learns the truth about the British class system: it’s not about money, it’s about breeding.
One of the funniest scenes in Peaky Blinders occurs in the opening episode of season three at Tommy Shelby’s wedding to Grace Burgess, who hails from a posh army family, many of whom turn up to the wedding in crimson cavalry uniforms.
One officer sneers at the assembled Shelby clan: “It's full of gypsies and blacks.” Just as it looks a brawl is about to break out, Tommy gathers his extended family in the kitchen and angrily instructs them: “No fighting, no fucking, no cocaine, no sports, no telling fortunes, no sucking petrol out of their fucking cars.”
Tommy Shelby starts out as a ruthless capitalist, as most successful gangsters are, but by the end of the series he converts to socialism… sort of. In last Sunday’s finale, Shelby dynamited his country mansion to make way for social housing for the poor. But his altruism hid an ulterior motive; he also wanted to hide evidence of the dead bodies buried on the premises.
The final scene of last Sunday’s show portrayed Shelby returning to his Romani roots, mounting a white horse and riding away against the backdrop of a burning caravan and to the sound of Lisa O’Neill’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “All the Tired Horses,” bookending the opening scene of the debut episode.
The message was clear: no matter how hard he tries to escape, he’ll always be a Shelby, and that, in the end, is a good thing.
Peaky Blinders has come to an end as a TV show, but it won’t be the last time we see Tommy Shelby on the screen. A movie version is already in the works featuring the same characters but set during the Second World War. Here’s hoping it’s better than The Many Saints of Newark.