From the moment Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby first sauntered through a Birmingham slum on horseback in 2013, ash pouring down to the strains of Nick Cave’s doom-and-gloom sermon “Red Right Hand”, it was obvious that Peaky Blinders was different. A post-First World War gangster drama set in a working-class area of Brum, backlit by factory flames and driven by a brooding, anachronistic soundtrack, it felt impossibly cool, stitching itself into the cultural zeitgeist like a razor blade in the peak of a flat cap.
There was the imperious Shelby, his ice-blue eyes scything down men with a sniper’s precision. Then there was the haircut – shaved back and sides, mop on top – the tweed three-piece suits, the themed pubs, the Monopoly set, the clothing line. Snoop Dogg was a Peaky fan; so, too, was David Bowie, who sent a photograph of himself in the signature flat cap to series’ creator Steven Knight. Nobody predicted it would be such a phenomenon, least of all Knight himself. Six series later, having garnered more than six million viewers in its prime, it’s striding into cinemas and onto Netflix with a long-awaited film, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, set in 1940, with Tommy grieving his daughter alone in a remote country pile.
