Peaky Blinders Series Six | Interview with Steven Knight (Writer & Creator)

Set the scene for the sixth and final series of Peaky Blinders…

I don’t want to give away any spoilers so I would just say: Tommy is about to face enemies and demons more powerful than anything he’s ever faced before. It’s the mid 1930s, fascism is on the rise, the Shelbys are more powerful than ever. But demons are coming to reclaim Tommy Shelby. 

And what can fans expect by the end?

What I’ve wanted from the beginning is to start off with a character who seems irredeemable. Who is switched off completely; whose humanity has been torn out of him by his experiences in the war. And then slowly bring him back to life, to turn him back into a human being over the however many hours that we’ve done. And I think at the end of six, for all the bad things that he’s done, Tommy is a human being.

Where do you get your stories and ideas from? Has there been a route map you’ve followed from episode one?

It’s nothing that logical really. The original impetus for doing it was from stories that my parents told me – remembering that they were kids when they experienced it – about these people, these illegal racketeers, who were my dad’s uncles. To them they were terrifying, legendary, mythological figures.

I remember the story that my dad told of when he was given a message to deliver by his dad, and he had no shoes and he ran barefoot over the cobbles to go and knock on the door where the Peaky Blinders hung out. He said the door opened and there was this waft of cigarette smoke and whisky, a table covered in money. Men immaculately dressed with guns and razor blades drinking whiskey out of jam jars… just that whole thing that they wouldn’t spend any money on things like glasses! So basically the impetus has always been capturing that sort of post-First World War damaged masculinity, and Tommy being the king of it all, and gradually making him come alive and become human.

But in terms of where the stories come from it is the same as anything that I write: I don’t plan in advance where it’s gonna go or what’s going to happen at all. In fact if I did, it might be more economical on ones fingers and thumbs in terms of how much you write. I just let it come from wherever it comes from. I’ve said before many times, it’s a bit like dreaming: whatever it is that makes your dreams happen, that seems to take control. Or it’s like playing a musical instrument where if you think about it, you stop. So I just tend to let it go and then almost find out what’s going on when you’re back, in a way. Which is why it’s quick. It’s not always right. But it’s always quick.

How do you decide where real history and real-life characters come in to what is a broadly fictional story?

That’s an interesting point, because with Peaky the structure comes from the march of time; from history, basically. I’ve tried to make it move forward two years at a time with each series. That gives me a year to work in, and then I look at what was going on in that year. I look at the big stuff but also at local papers like the Birmingham Evening Mail. Often there’ll be a report in the local paper that will completely contradict everything that the history books tell you about what was going on at the time. Then I try to combine that street level history with what is generally said to have been going on.

With the fascism thing I’ve got lucky – well, lucky for me, unlucky for the world. I started writing about [Oswald] Mosley and sort of at the same time the world suddenly seemed to get addicted to populism and nationalism and racism. And so it became topical. To the extent that when I was reading actual speeches that Mosley made, they were almost like photocopies of Trump’s speeches – ‘Britain first’; ‘fake news’; ‘fake press.’ Unbelievable. People think I’ve made this stuff up but I haven’t.

How has television changed in the time Peaky has been on air?

The most important thing, I think about Peaky in terms of what’s happened with television and what Peaky may have taught us is that things live for a long time on telly. Peaky got okay reviews in the first series, but it got no publicity in the US; it got nothing, got no push. But the great thing about telly is people have time to find it and it’s word of mouth. Peaky absolutely has blossomed as a consequence of people telling other people to watch it. There’s been no great big advertising campaign. There’s been no hype, in fact the opposite. And I think in the end I’m glad it worked that way, because people feel they’ve discovered it themselves, rather than that they’ve been directed towards it.

The show has always had a distinctive visual style. Did you have that in mind from the first scripts?

What I wanted to do was write it as if writing a film and imagine that it’s on a big screen. It makes it sound very logical and as if I thought it through – which I didn’t. I just wrote it as if it was a Western on a big screen and see what happens.

What did commissioners make of it at the beginning?

It was amazing – and God bless the BBC. Because if they like the idea, they say: ‘Go on; off you go’ and they leave you alone. And then you present it. And if they like it, they’re like: ‘OK. Go and shoot it.’ And that’s what we did.

Why is this sixth series the final one?

The reason is boringly practical which is that we lost a year due to the pandemic. The way these things are scheduled – it’s like turning an oil tanker around. We just felt, also with the loss of Helen [McCrory], that it all seemed to be pointing towards doing what I’m calling ‘the end of the beginning.’ Let’s end the beginning, then let’s do the film. And then let’s see where we go in terms of spin offs.