Peaky blinders

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is the film that fans of the television show have long been waiting for, so I must watch what I say. The story follows a group of exceptionally violent Birmingham gangsters operating between the wars and if you see it at the cinema you’ll hear a message before the opening credits. It’s Cillian Murphy imploring audiences not to give away any spoilers and ruin it for everyone else ‘by order of the Peaky Blinders!’. There will be no spoilers here today. I have no wish to get my face slashed. There will be no spoilers here today.

When Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol aired on FX in 2019, it was very quickly decided that, whatever it was, it wasn’t Dickens. From Guy Pearce’s foul-mouthed Scrooge to a scene in which Mrs. Cratchit strips and offers Ebenezer sex in exchange for money to buy the medicine she needs for her son Tiny Tim, it was a strange combination of would-be gritty social realism and hysterical prurience. It was not well-received in the United States: Salon’s comment that it was “short on joy and very, very, very long on purgatorial slogging” was typical.

Being of a squeamish sensibility and prejudiced by a low opinion of recent BBC drama, I can claim only a superficial acquaintance with Peaky Blinders. So my response to The Redemption of Thomas Shelby, a new ballet drawing on the popular television series about gangland Birmingham during the 1920s, is that of a rank outsider. Produced by Rambert (in association with Birmingham Hippodrome), it represents the company’s admirable attempt to find a broader audience and move out of the modern dance ghetto – hence presenting the show at the new Troubadour Theatre in Wembley Park rather than Sadler’s Wells. A spot check on the demographic suggests that it succeeded: but will this crowd come back when the programme is more demanding?

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Peaky Blinders would have you believe it’s the best of British: sharp suits and vests, the workingman’s flat cap and the gangster’s slo-mo swagger, the chug of Anglo alternative rock, and a smörgåsbord of regional accents, Academy Award-nominated guest stars and oh-look-I-remember-him cameos from historical figures. These are the ingredients of Britain’s answer to the American sagas that set new standards for television: The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad. Yet there’s always been the whiff of style over substance to Peaky Blinders, a sense of looking back without seeing anything new.