The show revolves around Birmingham gang leader Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy<\/a>) and his turbulent rise to power.<\/p>\n But were the Peaky Blinders real-life people once upon a time? Read on to find out how historically accurate<\/a> the figures are that we see on screen\u2026<\/p> The BBC\u2019s Peaky Blinders <\/a>opens on a slum street of Birmingham. The year is 1919. There are horses and Chinese fortune tellers, barely dressed urchins and men in suits so sharp they could take your eye out.<\/p>\n The atmosphere is febrile, smoky and crackling with nerves. It\u2019s the most distinctive-looking British drama you could conceive of, peering into an era that, until now, had slipped off history\u2019s radar, considered neither as muddy and tragic as the First World War nor as heroic and epic as the Second. Or perhaps history forgot these years on purpose.<\/p>\n The writer is Steven Knight \u2013 best known for Stephen Frears\u2019s 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things. \u201cFrom about 1918 until 1928 in England, it was just madness. Pure hedonism,\u201d he says. \u201cThere was a lot of cocaine, a lot of opium, a lot of dancing, a lot of nightlife.\u201d All of which sounds like a laugh riot, but of course it had its dark side; indeed, there was hardly any silver lining.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s where the Peaky Blinders come in, so called for the razor blades they kept in the brims of their sinister-looking caps and hats. They were the Shelby family, the Sopranos of the post-First World War era, with a few key differences \u2013 the society the Shelbys lived in had been racked by the war, leaving profoundly damaged men strewn across every class and community; revolution was in the air, and the Government was terrified of it; and the Peaky Blinders aren\u2019t remotely fictional.<\/p>\n Knight explains: \u201cThe reason it came to me was that my parents grew up in Birmingham in the 20s. My mum, when she was nine years old, was a bookie\u2019s runner; they used to use kids to take bets because it was all illegal. My dad\u2019s uncle was part of the Peaky Blinders. It was reluctantly delivered, but my family did give me little snapshots, of gypsies and horses and gang fights and guns, and immaculate suits.<\/p>\n One of the first stories that inspired me was of my dad when he was a little kid, sent to deliver a message. There was a table, covered in money and guns, surrounded by blokes, beautifully dressed, drinking beer from jam jars. You didn\u2019t buy glasses. You only spent money on clothes.\u201d<\/p>\n This atmosphere is captured wonderfully in Peaky Blinders. The gang\u2019s control in Birmingham has a Wild West quality, where the violence is instrumental and strategic, never savage or incidental, and the rules of society are being broken and remade in front of you.<\/p>\n But their lives are burdened by far more than the pressures of self-interest. The casualties of the First World War are everywhere: men who had survived the bullets, but would go to their graves before post-traumatic stress was recognised. The authorities were no good to these shell-shocked men: if anyone was going to watch over them, it would have been men like the Peaky Blinders.<\/p>\n The war and its aftermath are dealt with in an original and oblique way, as a hangover that nobody would acknowledge, but everybody had. Knight says that a load of clich\u00e9s dominate how this interwar period is played out in drama: \u201cWe tiptoe towards things because we\u2019re afraid of being seen to be glamorising or mythologising anything. If it\u2019s post-First World War, it\u2019s all officers shooting themselves. Or it\u2019s flappers, being done in the way flappers have always been done. But why would they behave like that? It was only a couple of years before then that you couldn\u2019t show an ankle, and suddenly they were in really short skirts. Why? Because they didn\u2019t give a damn.\u201d<\/p>\n As grim as the period must have been, from the distance of decades this is a transfixing time, decadent and bacchanalian, traumatised and anti-authoritarian, deeply political, desperate for things to be different, but petrified of change. \u201cI think there was a loss of faith in technology: before the war, there was this belief that every new discovery meant more progress.<\/p>\n Then nations just took all they\u2019d learnt and used it to destroy each other,\u201d says Knight. \u201cThe idea of the King\u2019s authority became a joke, for a while, because people in power had been sending 60,000 men to their deaths every morning and the blokes knew it was pointless. They\u2019d get the order [to go over the top], and think, \u2018No, you\u2019ve made a mistake, there are machine guns, and we\u2019re going to get killed.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\nWho were the real Peaky Blinders?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\""Programme\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/3\/2022\/02\/24303474-high_res-peaky-blinders-vi-d124ea1.jpg?quality=90&resize=619%2C413"\" "\\"\"Ep\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>