Peaky Blinders: behind the scenes with creator Steven Knight

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Peaky Blinders: behind the scenes with creator Steven Knight

Q: We left Tommy Shelby, not for the first time, in a bit of a pickle last time around. What’s the overarching story in series three?

A: He’s always in a pickle! In this series, he and the other members of the family have a lot of money and they’re getting richer, but it’s not solving their latest problems. As Tommy tries to get legitimate, everybody is trying to escape where they came from in their different ways. Series three is a study in 'can they get away'? Can they escape from what seems to be their destiny?

Q: That’s a classic gangster narrative, yet it’s not often told in relation to UK gangsters. Why don’t we tell these stories more often in Britain?

A: It’s not just a British thing, it’s a European thing. The very first things that were written in America were on the assumption that this was paradise. Cotton Mather [Puritan minister and author, 1663– 1728] and the Puritans wrote believing they were in the promised land. Everything they saw was God’s work, and Europe was bad and old, so I think the narrative of America is that what happens here is worthy of mythology.

This was an even greater influence on me than gangster films. [Think of] westerns, where they’re telling the story of 19th-century agricultural labourers, cowboys. These are people who were employed to herd cows from one place to another, and their story has become [part of] the mythology of the western world. Americans have done that to something mundane.

In Europe, I believe, our mythologising was done with knights and chivalry. We don’t really do that anymore. I don’t believe [this is] the result of anything other than timidity on our part. The stories in Peaky Blinders are based on what was told to me when I was a kid, and they were stories of things that happened to my parents when they were kids. They saw all of that through children’s eyes, which makes everything more mythological – everything a bit darker, and brighter, and better. I was a kid when I heard the stories [secondhand] and they were double-mythologised.

I deliberately chose in that first-ever series to keep the mythology there, not to say, “Let’s make it gritty and urban, isn’t it a shame”. Why? That’s why the first scene in the [very] first episode is Tommy on a horse riding into town, which is the start of any western. That was the point: I wanted to reference westerns.