BRITISH PERIODS dramas don’t usually have their theme music remixed by rappers. But Snoop Dogg’s rendition of “Red Right Hand”, in which he dons a flat cap and the alias “Snoop Shelby”, is just one of many hip-hop homages to “Peaky Blinders”, the BBC’s gangland drama. Other rappers have dressed up like the hero, Tommy Shelby, in music videos; some invite comparisons with his leadership skills. “I brought the fam together like when Tommy got the black hand,” rapped Dave in 2018. Some are more melancholic. Kambulat, a Russian MC, says: “I, like Thomas Shelby, would still walk with sadness.”
“Peaky Blinders”, back for its sixth and final season on February 27th, tracks the rise of an Irish-Romani gang in Birmingham after the first world war. Shelby (Cillian Murphy) yearns for respectability. He establishes companies—often fronts for criminal activity—and becomes a Labour MP, albeit one who spies on extremists on behalf of the state and murders his enemies. The show takes the country houses of “Downton Abbey”, shoots the hapless lords and replaces them with a compelling, factory-owning Al Capone speaking in the Birmingham argot.
It has become a global sensation, helped by a streaming deal with Netflix in 2014. Data from Parrot Analytics, a research firm, suggest the series is among the streaming service’s most popular offerings. Themed bars have sprung up in British cities including Liverpool and Manchester. The gang’s haircut—a number three on the back and sides with a short side-fringe on top—has become a staple among men from Mansfield to Manhattan. In 2018 Arthur, the name of Shelby’s bloodthirsty brother, was one of the most popular for newborn boys for the first time since the 1920s.
The show’s creator, Steven Knight, says he wanted to offer a more nuanced depiction of the working class compared with other period dramas. He set out to revive a lost history: the world of “Peaky Blinders” is complex, multicultural and divided into rival political and religious groups, each with their own fashion and leaders. This portrayal of working-class life rings true even if it is somewhat folkloric. In reality “peaky blinders” was a generic term for ruffians and was out of use by the 1920s, says Carl Chinn, a historian and author of “Peaky Blinders: The Real Story”. Mr Knight, who like Mr Chinn is descended from gangsters, embellished tales told to him by his parents and fashioned a ferociously scheming leader.
Mr Chinn thinks the show concentrates too much on the hustling and ignores real working-class hardships. But “Peaky Blinders” is gripping precisely because the man who emerges from the folklore is not a straightforward working-class hero: he is a ruthless thug and a keen capitalist, at least to begin with. When a factory manager calls Shelby a class traitor, he replies: “I am just an extreme example of what a working man can achieve.” At first Shelby’s approach, says Mr Knight, is to adopt the hardheartedness of aristocrats; that his rugged ambition has made him a popular character hints at a broad admiration for ruthless individualism.
Yet social mobility is a painful experience for Shelby. He struggles to gain respect in his new, more esteemed milieu and is made to carry out criminal deeds for his parliamentary peers. Still, the class war in “Peaky Blinders” is not just between aristocrats and peasants, but between the working classes themselves, who hold different ideas about how to improve their lot.
Mr Knight seems to be setting Shelby up for a moral conversion. He is a fan of “When the Boat Comes In”, a BBC series broadcast between 1976 and 1981; its protagonist, a trade unionist, sells out after mixing with high society. Mr Knight reverses this journey. Shelby starts out as a nihilist and slowly starts to believe in socialism—“to his own horror”, his creator says—because his own struggles make him realise he will always empathise with the downtrodden. The seeds of Shelby’s transformation from gangster to left-wing ideologue were sown during season four, when viewers learned he was sympathetic to the communist cause before the first world war.
The final episodes will further explore the resetting of his moral compass, perhaps to the disappointment of some viewers (YouGov, a pollster, finds that British fans are more likely to be Conservative voters than Labour supporters). They may keep the hero’s hairstyle anyway.
The sixth season of “Peaky Blinders” will have its premiere on BBC One and bbc iPlayer on February 27th
By The Economist
