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In the 19th century,

Birmingham was at the heart of a revolution.

A tumultuous change in living and working conditions

that swept across the world.

It created enormous wealth for some.

But also grinding inequality

and harsh living conditions for many.

It was the Industrial Revolution.

Birmingham also gave the world

a new name for a group of criminals.

They were known as...

Peaky Blinders.

But did they exist?

And who were the real Peaky Blinders?

I think Peaky Blinders kind of reinvented period drama

for a whole new generation.

It sort of... you think a period drama,

and you think of people in top hats and corsets

and umbrellas and fans,

and it just turned into this sort of swaggering,

cool, stylish cultural phenomenon.

When I read the first script that was sent to me,

it was just amazing.

I mean, Steven... Steven's script just leapt off the page.

You read it and it was an absolute pleasure.

People call it stylized, and it is,

but that just makes it appeal to a younger generation.

It gives it this kind of gloss of cool and light and shade.

You know, there are moments,

there are really slow moments

before you get these bursts of action or bursts of violence.

And it makes the rhythm of the show really interesting.

But I don't think we ever thought that it was, you know,

I didn't think at that... at the beginning

that we were going to do,

uh, that it would turn into what it became.

It kind of makes historical drama look like a pop video.

You know, people walk down streets in formation

in slow motion, and they and the other, uh, flourish

is the sort of anachronistic soundtrack.

They use modern music, not period music,

which is really vital

and it all adds to that kind of excitement and rock star

kind of quality you get.

I just thought we could do something

that came more from left field.

That was unexpected.

This is not a period piece that is, um, that is safe.

It's not that.

So we, you know, we're rooting for the baddies.

We're rooting for the anti-heroes.

We're rooting for the outlaws.

And there's a there's a thrill in that.

I think there always has been, you know,

from Robin Hood onwards.

Um, we're cheering on the baddies

because the baddies are really the goodies.

In his scripts,

Steven Knight created a bold and alternative way

of looking at history,

but how would that vision take shape on screen?

Led by director Otto Bathurst,

the challenge fell to production designer

Grant Montgomery and the crew,

who would set the tone for everything that followed.

Well, my first meeting with Otto at Tiger Aspect,

I went in and I, I remember saying,

I think it should look like 'Heaven's Gate.'

He was born into the world of the rich and powerful,

but his heart and dreams were with the people.

Heaven's gate.

It was really the watchword.

The first season was really, um, influenced

by that look of that film.

The second season was definitely,

I went to The Godfather.

You gave your word that you wouldn't break the peace.

I didn't give him anything.

What do you think this is, the army,

where you shoot 'em a mile away?

You got to get up close like this,

badabing, you blow their brains

all over your nice Ivy League suit.

Times have changed.

It’s not like the old days when you could do anything you want.

It's not personal.

It's strictly business.

Leave the guns.

Take the cannoli's.

I know it's a very English story

that's set in the industrial might

of the second city of the Empire in Birmingham.

But essentially,

the physicality of working class doesn't really remain.

You can go to a country house and you can see the, uh,

You can go to Chatsworth,

you can see how the super rich lived.

You can see how the middle class,

the upper middle class lived,

but working class less so.

So I was... I brought a kind of an Americana to it.

And that's... I was always influenced by,

um, that, that aesthetic,

the lawlessness of it.

You just get something more

from embracing a kind of genre and bringing it in.

What did you say your name was again?

I didn't.

A lot of the interiors,

for example, the Shelby betting shop,

their kind of nerve centre,

was really genuinely influenced by 'Rio Bravo,'

the sheriff's office.

Man gets shot that's got a gun,

there's room for a reasonable doubt.

Man gets shot that hasn't got a gun,

what would you call it?

If we look at the Garrison, um,

the interior of the Garrison

I researched some speakeasies in New York

to get that long bar look and the swinging doors.

So when you see Tommy coming through,

it's got a Western idiom.

It's a grand gangster epic.

And why not go to the, go to the benchmarks,

which are those... that genre in America.

But the comparisons with epic westerns

and the creation of some truly cinematic scenes,

gripping storylines and timeless characters

were the work of one man.

Show creator Steven Knight.

Peaky is based on stories told to me by my mum and dad

when I was young.

because my... they both grew up in small Heath in Birmingham,

a very sort of working class area.

My mum was a bookie's runner

because gambling was illegal at the time,

so she was eight years old

and she would walk down the street with a basket of washing

and people would drop bets into the basket of washing

because the police wouldn't arrest children.

And so she'd then go to the bookies,

walk past the guard dog, give it to the bookie,

and he'd take all the bets.

And my dad's uncles were

illegal bookmakers called the Sheldon's.

And we had we changed the name to the Shelbys

and they were known as Peaky Blinders.

So they were kids

when they witnessed all of these things happening.

So they glamorised it, they mythologised it.

And then when they told me I was a kid,

so I doubly mythologised it.

And when we started making the series,

I really wanted to keep that heightened reality,

the mythology of it all,

even though it's based on real people.

Well, when we start in series one,

the Shelbys are kind of bookies, really.

They're running a sort of, um, illegal betting operation

in the back streets of Birmingham,

and then across six seasons,

they just get bigger and bigger and bigger.

They go national, then they go international

and they end up taking over racecourses and fixing races,

and then they get into sort of bootlegging liquor

and making their own booze and then arms dealing and espionage.

And so it just becomes this sort of burgeoning

empire across six series that sort of takes it from something

very local to something very epic.

It's like a Western.

It's like, you know, once upon a time in the West Midlands.

We wanted from the very beginning

the statement of intent was,

let's make this as different

to a traditional British period drama as possible.

Everything.

So the swagger of it,

the way... it's the class of the people who are involved,

the language that's used

and then in terms of the soundtrack,

often when people are editing a scene,

they will put their favourite piece of music to it

to give it energy and life.

Um, and then, you know, subsequently say,

let's get something that's like that.

But what we did with this is that instead of saying,

let's get something like that, let's use that,

let's use the real thing.

Um, and we found that a lot of, uh, artists whose music we use

wanted their music to be on it.

So we got great deals from them

and since then, we've had people incoming

who want their music on our show.

Music is vital to Peaky Blinders.

I think it's...

a huge part of its appeal.

To start with, it kind of marked it out as,

this is a different type of period drama

because we're going to use 21st century rock music

in a drama set in in the 1920s.

It adds to this atmosphere of kind of lawlessness,

and it's like rebel music.

It's like outlaw music.

And I think what makes Peaky Blinders song

isn't particularly the lyrics or the genre,

it's a kind of spirit of outsiderdom and rebellion

and I...and I think that really shows.

I think that they use rock really well.

They use blues and jazz and indie and they use, you know,

in certain areas there's there's kind of Irish folk music

and sort of anything with that kind of sense of

lawlessness and outsiderness and rebellion,

I think is really exciting,

and it makes the drama so thrilling and propulsive.

And when you set a scene

of someone walking down a street to a rock song in slow motion,

you're away.

Steven Knight's vision was bold and ambitious,

but the initial funds were not quite on the same scale.

The budget wasn't big.

I think I had about 650,000 or something like that.

It wasn't a big budget,

and I remember we had to evolve things.

We couldn't have as many policemen on horses as we could

wish we could have.

We had to be really more clever in how we approached things.

We ended up recycling a lot of sets.

The Garrison pub was kind of used for about

one, two, three different settings.

It was cannibalised by the end

and we kind of put furnaces and we had a...

I got two furnaces built.

Was 2 or 3? I can't remember,

and they were just three walled pieces of MDF

that we had effects coming out of,

so it looked like they were burning.

And these, these moved around

pretty much from location to location.

What's interesting is again, it gives us a scale

and it gives us a reference to kind of that

'Once upon a Time in America,' look.

Gives us that kind of mythology.

Why not, being a pub right down where people were working?

It's not it's not a homage.

It's using those... those

piecing those... those references

to inform the audience

that this is not just a historical piece.

It's... it's... it's Mythology.

Mythological and yet historical.

The public reaction to 'Peaky Blinders'

has been unlike that to any other so-called period drama

seen on television in recent years.

People got into it first

before it sort of the media response to it,

but it was definitely ground level

where the thing started to catch on

because people started having the haircut

and wearing the hats,

and lots of things came together at the same time.

But suddenly there was a look, um,

that seemed to come from the show.

It's really influential on fashion and on music.

Um, also, I think under... an underrated aspect of it

is its influence on barbering.

You know, it's it created a whole

sense of haircuts and mustaches and beards and barber shops.

And it's sort of taken us back to that kind of culture as well.

And so I think it's really interesting,

particularly for young men.

What I always wanted this to be was

to tell a story about working class people that wasn't about,

isn't it a shame or aren't they hilarious?

Um, where working class people

and the adventures and misadventures

and the drama of of their lives are

as important as any other

group of people.

Um, which, again, is quite an American thing

because the American West is all about, you know,

what ordinary people would be like.

You know, the Shelby family are from a Romani Gypsy and

and Irish background,

and they're both traditionally, you know,

quite victimised minorities.

Um,

but obviously they become very successful

and very rich and powerful.

And Tommy becomes an MP and he becomes this big

sort of charitable force in the area.

And with all these connections, he knows Winston Churchill and,

you know, and he's... he's very well connected.

And they meet royalty,

but they will never be accepted as part of the establishment.

And I think that's really interesting.

I think it...

it says something about social mobility that it's possible,

but it's not quite possible.

You'll never quite fit in around the upper class.

And the upper class in 'Peaky Blinders'

are often the villains as well.

You know, it's about working class heroes

and upper class villains, which is really interesting.

It adds to the kind of the underdog Robin Hood

aspects of the story.

But I think what's really important is

that, you know, on housing estates in England,

people love it.

But it's also got a sort of hook into people who are not

who, who have no personal reference to this sort of world

or this sort of life seem to get it.

And these things are luck.

What wasn't luck,

but really good judgment from Steven Knight,

was the decision to set 'Peaky Blinders'

in the inter-war years.

I think the inter-war period is just such a rich time

in terms of, you know, there's communism,

there's the rise of fascism,

there's prohibition,

uh, there's the Great Depression,

there's the general strike,

there's all these historical events happen,

and it also creates this little universe.

It kind of bookends a series.

It's like, you know, 1918 to 1939.

It's pretty much 20 years.

So it's kind of the perfect period to cover

with sort of six series in a film.

He gave a smouldering,

unknown darkness to the characters' backstories,

but in particular that of Tommy Shelby.

What unspeakable things had he witnessed?

What had he endured?

And how had those experiences shaped the man we see on screen?

I just wanted to explore a character

who was obviously damaged by his experiences of war,

as many people were, um,

after the, I think, particularly the First World War,

because it was so face to face, it was so sort of...

Really the soft human beings,

the soft flesh coming really directly into contact

with the horrible hardness of artillery.

And also, you know, character-wise

it enables the Shelbys and the people they encounter

to have just come back from the war,

which is absolutely vital, I think, because,

you know, there's this generation of men

who have seen terrible things.

Um, and then they can come home and do terrible things

without really having a conscience about it.

War before that,

the technology wasn't such that it was such an uneven battle

between man and technology.

You know, it was people on horses,

um, charging each other.

Whereas now the technology was such that

you could be standing next to your comrade one minute,

and then you'd see him blown into his component parts

a second later

and just see what a human being is made of.

If you see what I mean.

So the whole concept of the human being is his soul

must have been challenged by the fact that

people you were very close to

would just be laid out in front of you like meat.

So 'Peaky Blinders' doesn't flinch away from...

It's not like the A-Team, where things would blow up

and then people walk free.

It kind of really shows.

And through the character of Arthur Shelby as well,

who's very haunted and traumatised

by the things he's done.

I think it shows the physical and psychological scars

of violence in a in a really admirable way.

I think he's vulnerable mostly to himself.

I've often referred to the idea that he's actually looking

for somebody strong enough to kill him,

and he hasn't found that person yet.

And is it going to be him that does it to himself?

Is one of the questions.

Tommy is... I think he's a bit of a mystery and enigma,

and I think that's what makes him really interesting.

He's kind of shell shocked.

And I think today you'd call it PTSD from the First World War,

which makes him and all the Shelby's, actually,

it makes them sort of fearless.

They're not scared of anything,

and that makes them really dangerous.

And I think Tommy is very clever.

He's very calculating, very shrewd.

He's kind of always one step ahead.

Um, and, yeah, he's just a classic anti-hero, I think.

He's like a sort of rock star of a character.

Steven] If he ever finds happiness and contentment,

then the thing that makes him extraordinary

will probably go away.

I didn't want to give him that.

I mean, I feel as if I know him so well

and all the family so well,

but it just felt that for him to continue on the road

that he's on,

he needed that avenue to contentment to be gone.

And naturally, Nate's decision

to cast Cillian Murphy was also inspired.

Now, it feels impossible

to imagine anyone else playing Tommy.

When this came up,

and I sort of realised how great an actor he was,

and then he came and he talked.

There was a few of us, and he sent shortly after he sent

a text saying, remember, I'm an actor.

Cillian's performance was just,

you knew we were on to something

because I remember sitting...

he was before we even started filming.

We did the photograph of them, three sitting

and you knew you were on to something.

He was just...

because most photographs people don't look into the... the...

the camera in that period.

They kind of look off it.

And he looked off it

and he just stood sat there and you just thought, That's Tommy.

He's looking...

He's looking beyond.

And I just knew that just looking at that just thought,

yeah, he's got it.

He's... he was brilliant.

Utterly brilliant.

He can transform himself

to the extent that you see on the screen now

where if you meet him in the street,

it's a totally different human being

And that's... some actors do that.

Some actors don't do that.

Some actors can't do that, some actors can do that.

But what he can do is extraordinary with himself,

with his whole presence of who he is.

But his performance is extraordinary.

I think he's an actor that really suits the role.

So he... he's a very still actor, very understated,

doesn't do much a lot of the time,

doesn't say much.

But he's got charisma in spades and he looks clever.

You can see cogs whirring behind his eyes,

which is what Tommy does.

And he's...

Yeah he's like... he is like a rock star.

He's like David Bowie or Iggy Pop of TV drama.

As you can see, he just takes over

as soon as he appears,

just as he did in 'Inception,'

which is the first time I ever thought, oh my God.

Um, when he just walks into a...

onto a screen full of all these famous big actors, big names,

and he just takes over

and that's what he does every time he's on.

So while Cillian Murphy's Tommy

is central to the narrative of 'Peaky Blinders,'

author Steven Knight's rise has been almost as remarkable.

He was the youngest of seven and unashamedly working class.

After studying English at UCL,

he got a job writing adverts for a radio agency.

That role

gave him a shot at working in commercial radio in London,

and it was at Capital Radio that he really hit the jackpot.

He was part of a team that devised and produced

the TV blockbuster.

This is a game show, 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire??'

Thank you.

Which I love and I'm very proud of.

We tried to make it the simplest game show.

You answer a question, you get some money,

you answer another question that's twice as hard,

you get twice as much money.

Then another one and another one.

and keep going forever.

The insurance companies wouldn't insure us for

an endless ability to win money,

so we put the ceiling on it at a million.

Um, and found that people were tending to,

um, keep the money

and not risk going on to the next stage.

So we had to think of lots of ways to keep them playing,

like phone a friend and ask the audience.

So this thing sort of evolved,

um, as we try to solve certain problems

and by accident and chance,

it turned into a really successful format.

New life has uncovered a terrifying secret.

The phenomenal output from Knight's keyboard

began to grow exponentially.

First came the 2004 film 'Dirty Pretty Things.'

From Exposing the Truth.

He was nominated for an Oscar

for Best Original Screenplay,

and from that moment onwards,

it's been an extraordinary ride.

Dirty pretty things.

Just recently,

he has even been driven to build a production base

and create his own film studio in Birmingham.

Both Tommy and Steven have faced adversity.

Their journeys know virtually no limits.

And just like Stevens, Tommy's story is far from over.

At first, people laughed

at the accents and all sorts of stuff.

You know that you get and you just have to think,

well, it doesn't matter.

Um, and you just keep going.

And then people started to show me photos of bars

in Buenos Aires or somewhere,

and there was some Peaky stuff and you'd think,

wow, what's happening?

You know, it was it was quite a shock, really.

I think it kind of created a whole subculture, really,

a whole youth culture.

You know, people dress as the Peaky Blinders.

You know, it's a really accessible subculture

to be a member of.

You know, all you need is a hat, essentially,

you don't need a, you know, a whole uniform.

Um, and it's just so... it's got huge cult appeal.

It's, you know, and it travelled the world on Netflix.

It's got a huge following in America.

People like, you know, everyone from Snoop Dogg

to Leonard Cohen and David Bowie liked it

because it's... there's something so British about it,

but also something very universal.

It's like a sort of, like I say, it's a gangster epic,

it's a Western, but it's set in Birmingham.

And that's a really heady cocktail, I think.

I mean, my background,

obviously working class background

and all of that's fine.

It's not like a flag that you have to wave, really.

But the point being that if you don't tell the stories

of 70% of the population of the country,

you're missing 70%, at least 70% of the stories.

I remember when I did 'Dirty Pretty Things,'

and back then

the fact that it was a story of a...

um, an asylum seeker from Nigeria was quite a thing.

But the point I made was,

if you get a minicab in London,

I guaran... not guarantee,

I'm pretty sure the story of the driver

will be more interesting than the story of the passenger.

And so why not tell the story of the driver?

It's not because you're being, again,

it's not because you're being nice,

but because it's... it's a better story.

And that's what writers should be doing.

They should be looking for that.

And in terms of class, you know,

if you if you decide not to tell stories about the working class,

why? I don't get it.

'Peaky blinders'

certainly is a story of the working class,

but how much of that story is myth,

and how much is rooted in the real history

of Birmingham's Mean Streets?

This is the Rainbow pub,

close to Birmingham's iconic bullring.

And something happened here in 1890 that is crucial

not only to our understanding of Peaky Blinders,

the real Peaky Blinders,

but also to our understanding of Birmingham's

rampant backstreet gangs.

We're at the Rainbow Pub because

this is where the dispute started

that led to an attack on a man

by the first gang members called Peaky Blinders.

It was a March night in 1890,

and an inoffensive chap called George Eastwood

from just up the road,

came into the bar here to have a drink.

Now he was a teetotaller.

He had a ginger beer,

and a bit later on three men with an evil reputation

came into the same bar.

And when poor old George ordered another ginger beer,

one of them said, "What are yow drinking that tack for?"

What are you drinking that rubbish for?

And he said, mind your own business.

I can drink what I want.

That was a bad move.

The three of them offered him outside for a fight.

Are you going to go outside and take on three men

who you know were hard men

because they're from the same neighbourhood?

Anyway, a bit later on, they leave,

and George must have thought,

I'll give it a few minutes and then I'll go as well.

And he left,

and he turned to go down Adderley Street

under two railway viaducts, a lonely part of the street.

He's going to go home.

He's going to go up a street nearby.

As he gets under this railway viaduct,

they come out of the darkness, the three thugs.

One of them shouts, "Give it to him hot, lads!"

And my goodness, they do give it to him hot!

They punch him, they kick him.

And then a man called Groom takes off his belt

and he delivers a terrible blow to poor old George's head.

He goes down.

They kick him up and down the street.

Somehow it's got to be fear and adrenaline

coursing through his body.

He manages to get up and he turns left, just down there,

and over there was the back wall of a school playground.

He's been chased they're after him.

He scrambles over the wall,

manages to get through the playground,

scrambles over another wall and turns left.

Bang, bang, bang on the door of Mr. Turner, who lets him in.

And the three men are not going to give up.

They stand outside for another hour

'Til chased off by the police, shouting, "Send him out!

We're going to kill him!"

All for drinking a ginger beer.

This was the first known reference

to Peaky Blinders,

but it was not to be the last.

Birmingham had a back street gang problem

from the late 1860s,

and they became known as slogging gangs

and their members were sloggers.

Now some of these street gangs

were made up of teenage lads

who would have big fights with the next street,

chucking stones at each other.

But some of them included nasty, violent, vicious men,

older teenagers and men in their 20s, 30s and 40s.

They battled each other, they baited the police,

and they bullied the hard-working, respectable poor

amongst whom they lived.

And this is really important we get this over.

They were not heroes.

They were people that bullied

the poor amongst whom they lived.

So there was generally a lot of theft offences.

When you look at crimes 100, 120 years ago,

theft, dishonesty, robbery, those sorts of offences

were the most prevalent across the whole of Britain,

as well as assaults, I guess, um, gangs, turf wars,

things like that.

Maybe the odd violent disorder.

Birmingham did have a massive back street gang problem,

but only in the poorer working class neighbourhoods.

It didn't affect the middle class.

That's why they didn't care about the poor being bullied

and the police being baited.

They were safely ensconced in pleasant suburbia in Edgbaston

and elsewhere that was upwind of the polluted areas

of the poverty-stricken neighbourhoods.

But Birmingham wasn't on its own.

Manchester and Salford had the scuttlers.

Liverpool had the corner boys,

the East End, parts of the East End,

parts of south London and north London

had street gangs that from 1898 were known as hooligans.

So that's what we need to understand.

There was various different gangs in London

throughout the late 1800s, early 1900s.

And then, of course, there's the Scuttler gang

in Manchester,

very similar turf wars, that sort of thing.

And I think there's a number of reasons for that.

One is the large number of people living densely together

in big working class neighbourhoods.

Poorer working class neighbourhoods.

So you haven't got that concentration in smaller places

like Bolton or Cardiff or other places like that.

And working class life was hard.

Poorer working class life was very hard.

And in a society when poorer men mean nothing

because they haven't got the vote,

they are unskilled,

so they're a pool of casual labour,

they can be used by capitalism

in a society when they are denigrated and have nothing,

the only thing they've got is their power as fighters.

And so physicality was prized.

Some people might today might call it toxic masculinity,

and there was a toxicity to it.

But you had to be hard to survive.

And so what they're saying is at the time,

our streets harder than your street.

I'm harder than you.

And that's the only thing they could boast about.

So these are fantastic images

because they are some of the first pictures

to be taken here at the lock up.

So these are from 1895.

So the lock up had only been open]

for four years at that time.

You've got your theft offences, your dishonesty.

So we've got forgery.

We've got false pretences.

But you can see, like some of these individuals,

the peaked cap, even the... the bowler hat,

and that actually being the typical attire

of the Peaky Blinder.

Peaky Blinders were so called because of a fashion.

Now, the original Sloggers were all poor men,

overwhelmingly.

Unskilled workers, labourers, street traders.

But about 1889, certainly by early 1890,

they'd adopted a fashion.

They'd always had a Daff, like a silkish scarf

pulled round the neck, knotted at the front.

So it was called a choker.

They kept that fashion.

But from certainly early 1890,

we're finding that they're being called the Bellbottom crew.

That's because they wore bellbottom trousers

tight to the knee

and then really wide, going down 22 inches.

The original Peaky Blinders did not wear flat caps.

They wore billycocks, which is the working man’s bowler hat.

So what they would do, they'd have closely cropped hair.

They wanted to show off to their girlfriends and pals

when they hadn't got their hats on.

All of the wounds and marks and scars they had on their skull

inflicted by the belts of their enemies

and by the staves of the police.

And then they would get the bowler hat,

and they'd get the front part of it,

and they'd fondle it and wet it, hold it over a fire

and funnel it into like a funnel.

They'd hold it over and then mould it into a funnel.

So they put it on their head

and they had a quiff of hair.

They like this quiff of hair.

That was the thing that really marked them out.

So they would pull the brim that turned into a funnel

over one eye to allow the quiff to be shown off.

Hence, the peak blinded the eye.

When the flat cap came in,

they did exactly the same thing.

It's a fashion.

And then there were the Peaky Blinder women.

There was quite often female members of gangs or the moles

as they were known of the Peaky Blinders.

The, er, girlfriends that were

sometimes pushed into criminality.

Maybe, sometimes willingly.

Young women providing the stones

for fights against their enemies,

whether it's another backstreet gang

or attacking the police.

So in Birmingham, a lot of the cobbles on the street

could come out easily

and they would be picked up by the girlfriends,

and they would put them in their pouch of their aprons.

They would supply their men with what were known as dockers,

chucking them at each other.

The weapons they used were those that they had,

their belts, their boots,

half house bricks that they could smash on the street.

Stones, metal coshes

because we're a metal making city in Birmingham.

And then, of course,

there was the other side.

The forces of law and order.

It was a dangerous place to be a police officer.

We had a variety of different assaults on police officers,

some very, very serious.

It was not uncommon for police officers to be stabbed

in the line of duty.

Many of them luckily survived,

several of them tragically lost their lives

and are recorded on our roll of honour.

It was a very, very dangerous place

to work as a police officer.

In newspapers, only brief accounts

of policemen who were retired in the 20s

saying when we joined the Birmingham police,

it was a war on the streets and we had to fight back.

So James Walters is an example of a young Birmingham officer

going out to patrol the streets of Birmingham at night time,

and he was one of many officers viciously assaulted

just doing his duty,

just trying to keep the peace and order.

And he was attacked by three men

after trying to arrest two of them for assaulting him,

really badly beaten and had to be medically retired

with only eight months service.

John Cherry from a really respectable family.

His dad was a skilled worker.

Born in Massachusetts, the family came back to Birmingham.

They must have regretted the move.

in 1902, his two younger brothers,

David Cherry, five foot, very small,

and his brother Frank,

followed PC Blinkoe down Sherborne Road in Balsall Heath.

Poor old Blinkoe had gone with another officer the day before

to serve a minor notice for an offence

on one of Cherry's mates.

They're slinking around behind the officer, people are saying.

You know, they're kind of watching from a corner

and then they go at him.

He doesn't know they're behind him,

and David Cherry pulls out a meat cleaver,

and he cleaves it into the back of the head

of PC Blinkoe who falls,

and as he's on the floor, they chop him again,

and his brother Frank said, "Come on, we've got to go."

The screams from women nearby.

Two women run over,

they see the brains of PC Blinkoe,

they faint.

Unbelievably,

they managed to get, some other people come running over.

They get a horse and a carriage,

and they rush him to what was called the Queen's Hospital.

Later, the Accident hospital in Birmingham.

And his life is saved by the surgeon,

and he eventually has a metal plate in his head.

And after months and months and months off,

do you know what PC Blinkoe did?

He went back to work

and he served honourably in the Birmingham Police.

Action had to be taken.

The time had come to confront

the menace of the Peaky Blinders.

By the 1890s, Birmingham was looked down upon

as the city of the Peaky Blinders.

One of the most violent places in England.

Now that didn't affect

the upper middle class in Birmingham.

Joseph Chamberlain was our great leader.

Birmingham was proclaimed

as the best governed city in the world.

Chamberlain never once mentions the poor

who were being bullied,

the coppers that are being brutally assaulted,

having to leave the police force or being killed.

Not once.

Do you know why?

Because the poor didn't matter.

The better off working class did,

because they voted.

The men voted.

The poor didn't vote.

Many of them were disenfranchised

because they had to move regularly.

So eventually the situation was so bad

that, as my great uncle Bill told me,

they were sent over to Ireland

for Charles Haughton Rafter to come over

with his Irish muckers to sort out the problem.

Charles Haughton Rafter was a Protestant from Belfast

in the Royal Irish Constabulary,

and in the series there's a Protestant officer

called Major Campbell,

who was sent over from Belfast

to sort out the Peaky Blinders gang of the series.

He's sectarian.

He hates Catholics.

Rafter wasn't sectarian.

He came to Birmingham in 1899 with a letter of recommendation

from an Irish nationalist Catholic MP,

saying that he had been fair

in all his dealings with the Troubles in Ireland.

With the implementation of Rafter,

the fight back against the Peaky Blinders had begun.

He was instrumental in developing

the Birmingham Police Force.

He came to us in 1899

after already doing 16 years in the Royal Irish Constabulary.

He was the only candidate to turn up to his interview

in full dress uniform,

so straight away he set out his stall.

He's impressed the watch committee

and he was appointed as Chief Constable in 1899,

where he served all the way up to 1935.

By 1901,

only 1% of Birmingham's population was Irish born.

Now there was a lot more that were of Irish descent,

but Irish born.

10% of the police force was Irishmen.

A lot were from Wales,

the others were from the countryside.

They had to be tall and fit.

He recruited the first female police officers in Birmingham

in 1917, who were some of the first in the whole country.

He was responsible for implementing the blackout

at the start of World War One,

when people said he was scaremongering

and it was unnecessary.

He was a very early advocate of crime prevention advice,

and also of separating juveniles from adults

in the criminal justice system.

So he was really forward thinking,

and he really developed the force

and the professionalism of the Birmingham officers.

He knew he had to recruit rapidly lots of young, fit men.

So instead of the police going on the beat on their own

and being beaten, they go two men.

He had lots of different strategies for improving

and professionalising the police in Birmingham.

One of the things he had was educational classes

to improve the general understanding

and general education of the men.

They were voluntary, but you were expected to go

so generally improving the men themselves

more professionalism.

He had a real thing about uniform and standards

and wanting the officers to look the part.

On top of that,

he tells the magistrates that any attack on a policeman

six months minimum,

that's the most a magistrate can give.

Any serious attack has to go to a higher court.

So they're getting sent down for longer, tougher policing.

He's also known for going around police stations

and highlighting dirt and uncleanliness

and highlighting these as particular issues.

So he had very, very high standards,

I think, across all elements of policing.

He asks three things of his recruits.

Can you read?

Can you write?

Can you fight?

Rafter's reforms

helped curb the activities of those labelled as Peaky Blinders,

as did the coming of new working class pastimes

like football, boxing and cinema.

But what truly reduced their numbers

was the looming outbreak of the First World War.

And by 1910, the Birmingham newspaper said they've gone.

And in the First World War,

one Birmingham newspaper says in '15,

"What's happened to the Peaky Blinders?

Well, the police are really happy because

some of them are fighting in the war.

Others are earning good money in the munitions factory.

Now, isn't that interesting?

Pay people properly.

And these men who'd broken so many laws of the country,

many of them volunteered even though they didn't have to

because of their age, to fight for the country.

So World War One,

a whole generation of men disappearing

to the front line to go and fight for their country

and the Peaky Blinders and other gangs and criminals

in Birmingham were no different.

Lots of them went to go and fight for their country

and they did their bit.

One of them was Henry Lightfoot,1895.

He's the only individual I've come across in court

that is named as a Peaky Blinder.

His brother led a local gang in Highgate.

He was a violent man, a thief.

He was one of those Peaky Blinders

that was not necessarily in a big gang,

but had lots of mates.

And it was a petty thief,

the kind of things that he stole,

his last offence was stealing six scrubbing brushes.

His first offence was nicking a dog.

These are not big organised gang members.

But in 1914, at the age of 41,

he joined up to fight for his country.

Old habits die hard.

He got chucked out for attacking an officer.

He joins up again the next year.

He spends time again in the glasshouse,

the prison for offenders in the army,

and he comes out in May 1916.

His battalion is mobilised to go to France,

and on the second day of the bloody battle of the Somme,

the Peaky Blinder, Henry Lightfoot

is badly injured and lost his eye.

He didn't come back a worse man from the war he'd seen.

He was a worse man before the war.

He came back a better man.

That's not to say they were perfect soldiers,

and I'm sure many of them had long disciplinary records

and maybe left dishonestly.

But yes, they did do their bit and it would have affected

what it was like to live in Birmingham, as a result,

with all these men disappearing

and just looking at who was left.

After the war.

The gang's attention shifted

from the back streets of the city

to the lucrative racecourses of England.

Gambling, extortion, bribery and corruption

all played their part,

as the criminals who once filled the ranks

of the Peaky Blinders

became increasingly involved with organised crime.

Out of this chaos,

a few key gang leaders came to the fore.

Steven Knight would later take those characters

and mould them into the story of Peaky Blinders.

From the ranks of the worst Peaky Blinders,

a semi-organized gang emerged

called the Brummagem Boys, the Birmingham Gang.

And this was made up of small groups of pickpockets

and blackmailers of bookmakers on the racecourse.

Why did they go racing?

What are people taking to a racecourse?

Cash.

There's very little security, if any.

There's hardly any police covering the racecourses.

So these gangs can operate with impunity.

They'd come together just before the First World War,

led by a man called Billy Kimber.

But not just him.

There's others around him.

The real Billy Kimber was a Brummie

from a tough part of Birmingham, called the Summer Lane,

which had several gangs.

In the series he's portrayed as a Londoner.

He wasn't a Londoner,

They go to war.

The Birmingham gang with their London allies in 1921.

The first gang war

between gangs from different cities in British history.

They go to war over control of the rackets down South

because they beat up a Jewish bookmaker called Alfie Solomon.

He's called Solomons in the series.

His real name was Alfie Solomon.

How do I know that?

Because I interviewed his younger brother in tough a pub

in north London in 1987.

And Alfie Solomon in the series

is portrayed as like an Orthodox Jewish guy

wearing the long frock coat and the high collared shirts,

and his mind is, I think he's called Ishmael

with the ringlets.

Alfie Solomon was not an Orthodox Jewish guy

from the East End.

He was a secular Jew from north London.

I've traced his family back to at least the 1820s.

Alfie Solomon is beaten up badly at Sandown Park in 1921.

He pulls in an up-and-coming Anglo Italian gangster

called Darby Sabini.

In the series, he's shown as a mafia style don,

elegantly dressed, a bella figura,

with his cane and his hat,

speaking English with an Italian accent.

No he wasn't, he was born in Clerkenwell.

His mum was an Englishwoman, Eliza Hanley.

His dad had come over to England, not from Sicily

but from northern Italy, as a youngster.

Sabini always seen himself as an Englishman

with Italian roots.

He had a gang of tough Anglo Italians

and men of solely English heritage.

But even though in real life Darby Sabini

was not an Italian mafioso,

the parallels between the mob's organised crime networks

and the Peaky Blinders needed exploring,

and the added tension

gave rise to some great drama and conflict.

I mean, we've always been fascinated by, by crime

and particularly by criminal sects and the like.

You know, there's a long history of being fascinated.

I mean, it's objectively fascinating.

The darkness, the mystique.

And the interesting thing is that mafiosi themselves

are far from immune to this.

I've been in mafia bosses' houses

where there's pictures of Marlon Brando

or Al Pacino on the wall

and that kind of thing that, you know,

they play The Godfather theme at their weddings and so on.

It's a version of the old, old Mafia mystique,

the charisma of the problem solver,

the man who doesn't go to the police

but whose identity is defined by his independence,

and so on and so forth.

Uh, and it helps...

It helps recruitment, and it helps disguise

that secret society element

and the real nature of Mafia power.

But the Mafia and the Peaky Blinders

have some fundamental differences.

For a start, the Mafia lived by a strict code.

One of the things that distinguishes the Sicilian Mafia

from any ordinary band of criminals

is the fact that they have an ideology.

They have an ideology internally.

This band of blood brothers cemented by ritual.

They invent ancient origins for themselves.

They say they go back to the this medieval confraternity

called the Beati Paoli.

It's completely fictional,

but it makes them seem noble and so on.

So there's an internal ideology.

But they've also got an external ideology,

which for mass consumption, if you like.

And the people who articulate this fiction

are the Mafia's lawyers.

Is it true that in the year 1950,

you devised the murder

of the heads of the so-called five families in New York?

It's a complete falsehood.

And that fiction has an immense influence.

You know, it starts to appear in anthropological textbooks

and it becomes, quickly gets sort of academic

and literary credibility.

Um, and it survives for a long, long time in many ways.

'The Godfather,' the movie, 'The Godfather'

and the novel it's based on

are part of that ideology.

Right or wrong.

You know, Michael, now that you're so respectable,

I think you're more dangerous than you ever were.

Another huge difference

is that the Mafia is not based on genuine family,

but on a so-called brotherhood

shrouded in the deep and dark past.

Whereas the story of the Peaky Blinders

revolves around the ambitions of a real-life family,

the Shelbys.

Because of 'The Godfather,' yeah?

We're used to thinking of a mafia family being about

uncles and cousins and fathers and sons.

Family in that sense, blood family

in Sicily, family is a metaphor.

Yeah, it's a metaphor for the close relationship

between the blood brothers who make up the organisation

the Sicilian Mafia, now known as Cosa Nostra, has rules.

You know, no more than two members

of the same blood family

can belong to the same Mafia family,

because they need to protect the organisation

from being overly dominated by kin groups

and the politics of inheritance and so on and so forth.

But both the Peaky Blinders

and the Mafia have a shared deadly trait.

Violence is central to what they do.

The power to kill people and get away with it is

absolutely central to what they, what Sicilian Mafia is about.

That said,

the more efficient Mafia boss is,

the less he will actually have to resort to violence.

It's about reputation.

It's about spreading fear

so that people will obey without

without your having to point a gun at them.

The result is a captivating mix,

blending the darkness, threat and aura of the Mafia,

with the raw aggression, ambition and home-grown grit

of the Peaky Blinders.

This is a new kind of historical storytelling,

one that draws on westerns,

organised crime and street violence,

to forge a modern mythology.

It certainly changed television, I think.

Period dramas now are a completely different beast.

You know, some of them written by Steven Knight,

writer of Peaky Blinders, some of them not.

So you get things like 'SAS Rogue Heroes,'

'A Thousand Blows,'

which are like new types of period drama.

But then that leaks into shows like,

'Dope Girls' on the BBC now.

And, uh, 'Mussolini, son of a century.'

very Peaky Blinders influenced.

So I think it's transformed

the nature of historical drama on TV.

And what's been the most heartening,

first of all, the fact that it's international,

that people have no concept of

what small Heath would be like, or Birmingham in the 20s

or anything like that.

People have responded all over the world

and in a phenomenal way.

Peaky Blinders doesn't set out

to be a historically accurate documentary.

Instead, Steven Knight

has crafted a compelling group of characters

inspired by real events

through sublime storytelling, he weaves a riveting plot

anchored by the magnetic performance of Cillian Murphy,

and all set against the distinctive backdrop

of Birmingham.

The Peaky Blinders series

has been a common international phenomenon,

with the charismatic acting,

the pulsating modern soundtrack to a historical drama,

and the storyline itself is compelling.

But it's not real.

It's not real, but it's grabbed attention.

I think it brings Birmingham to really vivid life.

I think Birmingham's a very unglamorous, underrated,

undersung city.

You know, people take the mickey out of the accent

and the bull ring,

and I think Peaky Blinders really put it on the map.

And I, and I think the people of Birmingham

are very, very proud of Peaky Blinders

and they think it does it justice.

It's not historically totally accurate.

It wasn't ever... it was never intended to be.

But it's got a...

aesthetic that is true to itself,

true to the story,

true to Steven's creation of this world.

I think all the craft elements that came in costume, makeup,

music, production design and cinematography supported that,

totally.

But you've got to...

But first and foremost, you've got to have a great script.

Alas

bar none.

But it's all part of the trajectory of Tommy Shelby.

Where his plans work

until they don't.

And then he's pulled back...

Always pulled back,

always pulled back to where he's from.