I will concede this to the flat-capped and pocket-watched fleet of Peaky Blinders zealots: there is something mightily compelling about watching Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby stride in slow motion through fog, suited and pistol bared, as Fontaines DC’s Grian Chatten growls so loudly it threatens to shake the speakers off their perch.
He’s a character so embedded in British pop culture that in The Immortal Man, his feature-length swan song, when he encounters a soldier at a bar who spits out derisively, “who the f*** is Thomas Shelby?”, the whole cinema audience responded by hooting with laughter. Tommy responds by shoving a grenade down the man’s shirt.
