TV review: Peaky Blinders has integrity from the bottom to the top
2G0P3FT London.UK. Helen McCrory in ©BBC Studios/Caryn Mandabach Productions/Tiger Aspect Productions/Screen Yorkshire TV Series, Peaky Blinders (TV) (2013)
(BBC One, Sundays, 9pm) has integrity — that’s why we keep coming back for mo r e. It doesn’t matter that it’s one long tribute western or that Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby walks as if he goes everywhere on a horse or that Tom Hardy’s Alfie Solomon seems like a comedy character from a different show or that Charlene McKenna’s IRA woman wears a foolish beret — put it all together in one show and just works. It’s a world of its own, a sorely missed world since season five ended in 2019.
The last time we saw Tommy Shelby, it looked like he might have shot himself. He would have too if his brother Arthur hadn’t emptied the bullets out of his gun as a precaution. A deft touch to start the final season, reminding us that for all the booze and cocaine and violence and heavy metal, the two brothers still look out for each other.
That touch was more than matched in the send-off for Helen McCrory, the actress who played Aunt Pol, who died last year. (Spoiler alert: skip the next sentence if you don’t want to hear what happened to Aunty Pol.)
The actors just stopped acting for a minute and stood mute and sad, staring at Aunt Pol’s funeral pyre in a gypsy caravan, after she was killed by the IRA. No other show would have come up with that kind of a tribute, but then Peaky Blinders has integrity from the bottom to the top.
Next thing we know, it’s four years later and we’re on a bleak French-held island off Newfoundland that won’t win any prizes in Tidy Towns. Tommy is meeting Pol’s son, Michael, who has sworn to avenge his mother’s death by killing said Tommy, so things are pretty tense. One of Michael’s goons seems like he perfected his Dublin accent by gorging on Colm Meaney in tapes, but that doesn’t matter. Halfway through the first episode, and you can’t take your eyes off the return of .
The only worry is that Tommy Shelby is sworn off the booze. Please drink responsibly and all that, but I seem to remember that just wasn’t itself when Don Draper put down the bottle. Anyway, Cillian Murphy brings a fresh level of menace to the role, as if the drink had been holding him back.
But the best thing about this first episode was the way that it felt like it was on the verge of taking the piss out of itself. There is a comic sensibility to a lot of , even without Alfie Solomon monstering it up. Tommy seems to shoot a random owl in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment during a tense showdown in a bar. The French chief of police strokes his cat, Bond villain style.
The plot matters a bit, but not too much. Because with it’s more about the journey than the destination. I love all of it, right down to the birdsong tribute to Helen McCrory as the credits rolled.
