Some will come for the boxing. The Peaky Blinders creator, Steven Knight, has set his latest endeavour in the East End of London and the shadowy underworld of late‑Victorian bare-knuckle fighting. The new series is called A Thousand Blows, and this is an understatement. Some will stay away because of the boxing. This would be a mistake, because it is about so much more. It is about all kinds of violence – that perpetrated against children by those supposed to protect them, against the increasingly poor by the increasingly rich, against women by men, against the colonised by colonisers – and what happens when you throw people together in the melting pot of a rapidly industrialising city where only the fittest can survive.
There is a lot going on – narratively, thematically and cartilage crunchingly – in Knight’s historically based (but freely tweaked) saga. The man knows what he is doing, though, and the experience is one of energetic abundance rather than chaos. If you are left wishing there had been more time to get to know some of the marginal characters – well, what a rare sensation that is, compared with wishing you weren’t watching padded ciphers drifting round a barren plot. The conclusion leaves us set fair for a second series, so those tantalisingly peripheral people may yet get a chance to move centre-stage.
