Given the global reach of the Peaky Blinders, next month’s Netflix-backed movie threatens to be as momentous as a new Downton or Bridgerton, only with razor blades concealed about its person. This week, that anticipation secures a pay-per-view release for this hour-long meat-and-potatoes primer, fashioned by Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s dad, Robin Bextor, out of much the same combo of talking heads, drone shots and fair-use clips you would normally encounter on free-to-air Channel 5.
Uppermost in the edit is a recognition that Steven Knight’s creation was one of those peak TV shows that blurred the televisual and cinematic. Heaven’s Gate, The Godfather and Rio Bravo provide contextualising material; critic Michael Hogan positions the show as Knight’s answer to Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, the 2002 Shane Meadows comedy.
The talk is widescreen, at least, even if the delivery format remains small screen. Bextor’s most illuminating inquiries come early on, addressing how Knight expanded on stories bequeathed by his parents, which inspired first a concerted attempt to recreate Birmingham’s working-class past and thereafter a modern pop-cultural phenomenon. Production designer Grant Montgomery recalls recycling sets in the show’s formative BBC days; Hogan hails the show’s “rebel music” – the anvil-smashing rock and pop – that helped to catch ears as well as eyes. Peaky Blinders was a popular sensation before it developed into a network-hopping brand, a subculture endorsed and sustained by the undercut sported by Cillian Murphy becoming visible everywhere from Balsall Heath to Buenos Aires.
Just as Knight’s show is emblematic of an unusually confident moment in British TV, this patchwork tribute indirectly reflects today’s mend-and-make-do arts coverage. (In previous eras, Knight’s cultural triumph would surely have merited the full Yentob treatment.)
Bextor covers a fair bit of turf, taking irrepressible Brum historian Carl Chinn’s walking tour and paying a cautionary visit to the West Midlands Police Museum. Perfunctorily packaged though it all is, there’s even a lesson for the industry to heed; as Knight puts it, “If you don’t tell the stories of 70% of the population, you’re missing at least 70% of the country.”
