It’s got ambition and scale and considerable skill has gone into the visual side of things.
#Peaky blinders season 4 episode 1 tv
This is definitely British TV trying to do a US-style box set drama. Peaky Blinders’s own Way Down in the Hole is Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand which tops and tails every episode. Realism has been ditched in favour of male extras, stripped to the waist, swinging hammers in front of fiery furnaces while a covers band has a go at Ocean Colour Scene’s back catalogue. In all other respects, they’re going for a British Deadwood. For a channel which can make fascinatingly impenetrable stuff like The Shadow Line and stylish yet substantial stuff like The Hour, the dialogue is just too dim. Peaky Blinders doesn’t so much sidestep gangster cliches as fling its arms round them. And Grace and Tommy exchange looks in the street to denote their growing interest in one another. Danny, his death successfully faked, is bound for London but it’s not clear whether he’s taking the gons with him. “That the IRA murdered my father will not affect my judgment,” she says to Campbell, so we know she has an agenda. With the Troubles in Ireland reaching the boil, it’s assumed that the IRA took the guns (or “gons” as everyone pronounces it here) and Belfast’s best copper CI Campbell (Neill) is dispatched to Birmingham on a noisy, hurtling steam train to sort it out.Īs we leave them at the close of this week’s opener, Grace the Irish songbird meets Sam Neill in an art gallery and turns out to be working undercover for him, to try and find out what happened to the gons. They didn’t bother to open the crate first. When we meet them, Tommy has just taken part in a to-order robbery during which his men mistook a consignment of four motorbikes for a load of machine guns and ammo destined for Libya. Aunt Polly ( McCrory on her usual roaring form) has been minding the shop and sits in the unofficial driving seat of their bookmaking and robbing business, clearly doing all the thinking. He’s back from Flanders Fields, the exposition tells us, minus his libido and intent on increasing the gang’s profits.
The angular and brilliantly impassive Murphy stars as Tommy Shelby, new head of Birmingham’s criminal overlords, the Peaky Blinders, so named because they have razorblades in their caps which they use to, you know, blind people.
That said, Cillian Murphy, Helen McCrory and Sam Neill count for a lot, even when they aren’t entirely sure which city they come from. The accents are all over the shop and the dialogue is often eye-poppingly bad. In the first episode of BBC2’s new period gangster drama/steampunk beer commercial, we learn that Brum’s postwar slums were mostly peopled with actors who weren’t from there.īefore we even get to the amazing set design or the slick, ad-style art direction, or the way Sam Neill keeps a straight face when he says, “It’s beaver”, we need to tackle two problems.
Don’t read on if you haven’t seen episode one.īirmingham, England, 1919.
#Peaky blinders season 4 episode 1 series
SPOILER ALERT: This blog is for those who are watching series one of Peaky Blinders.