5 Directions The Peaky Blinders Movie Might Take

Before Peaky Blinders came along, few people outside the UK knew how or why Birmingham existed. Despite being the second-largest city in the British Isles, it simply doesn’t get the name recognition of places like Liverpool (home of the Beatles) or Manchester (home of ecstasy). As the city’s own native son, Stewart Lee, has noted, “Birmingham has more miles of canal than Venice. To which a Venetian will counter ‘Yes, but it’s quality, not quantity’.”

But stick Cillian Murphy in a tailored suit, and suddenly people across the world are snarling about the orders of the Peaky fookin’ Blinders in a Brummie burr. Like it or not, Peaky Blinders is a runaway success story. And now, creator Stephen Knight has confirmed that the story will play out in full, telling Deadline: “Covid changed our plans. But I can say that my plan from the beginning was to end Peaky with a movie. That is what is going to happen.”

Back in 2018, Knight said that from the off, he had an “ambition of making it a story of a family between two wars, and by ending it with the first air raid siren in Birmingham”. At one time there had been the possibility of a seventh season, but the pandemic has put paid to that.

So, yes, as a television drama Peaky Blinders will cover the ‘six seasons and a movie’ that Community so famously pegged as the sweet spot. As it is, the sixth and the film have a lot of ground to cover – the fifth was set in 1929, and that final air raid siren will take events up to 1940. This gives them eight hours or so of screentime to deal with the Blinders’ adventures through the dirty thirties.

But the film will not, cannot, just be the same material as another season might have been. When a TV show gets its own film – well, the way I phrase it kind of gives it away. It’s a bump up, an opportunity to go all out and get a bit special. So here’s five ways that might happen:

 

1. The Battle Of Cable Street

Early 20th-century race riots have been a minor staple of prestige television recently, with both the Watchmen miniseries and Lovecraft Country using the Tulsa Massacre as historical backdrop. In practice, however, this accidentally became edutainment. These shows were what alerted many audience members to the fact the Tulsa Massacre had actually happened, given that it tends to be neglected by history classes.

The same is true of the Battle of Cable Street, and probably for the same reasons. Nobody much likes highlighting their country’s lower points – in Tulsa’s case, an anti-black pogrom, and in Cable Street’s, a fascist march which was planned to pass through a heavily Jewish area of London. It’s the sort of grimy, grubby, not-very-nice episode of history that Peaky Blinders absolutely thrives upon.

On Sunday 4 October 1936, around 3000 members of the British Union of Fascists planned to march through the East End of London, with 6000 officers of the Metropolitan Police there to keep order. They were met by an estimated 20,000 counter-protestors. In the ensuing mayhem, surprisingly, nobody died .

Since the fifth season introduced BUF leader Oswald Moseley as the new baddy, and made him a robust enough villain to live through the season at that, this is a no-brainer – particularly as the other side of the battle has also been given form in Tom Hardy’s scene-stealing Alfie Solomons. The only potential problem is that this puts the Blinders themselves on the sidelines, but if there’s one way to make a razor gang seem like the good guys, it’s having them kick the shit out of actual fascists.

 

2. The Star-Spangled Blinders

There is already a trend in British television for the film spin-off’s big event to be going on holiday, and very often going over to America. Mr. Bean took a trip over the pond to have comic mishaps there, as did the Only Fools And Horses boys and the hapless functionaries of The Thick Of It. Yeah, despite all the snobbery, Brits do see America as basically the end goal, cowboys, hamburgers and all.

America is already vaguely on the Blinders’ radar – with prohibition in full effect, they’ve been shipping bootleg gin over there in what somehow turned into a real-life marketing push, and then they got buggered by the 1929 crash. But the 1930s was a boom time for American gangsters, and most notably Peaky Blinders has already mentioned – but never brought onscreen – the king of Chicago himself, Al ‘Scarface’ Capone.

Peaky Blinders has become a veritable menagerie of well-respected character actors: Tom Hardy, Paddy Considine, Adrien Brody, all have popped in as Murphy’s various rivals, and both Aiden ‘Littlefinger’ Gillen and Alexander ‘Big Sid’ Siddig turned up to be attractively older trophy boyfriends for Helen McCrory’s Polly Gray. Given the reach of the show’s fandom, there’s probably a few actors out there already champing at the bit to play Capone.

Whether this would mean the Blinders fighting the Capone outfit, or teaming up with them to pull off the heist of the century, or possibly even both. And it needn’t just be Capone, either – Peaky Blinders has made a habit of featuring fictionalised versions of lesser-known historical crime figures. Alfie Solomons, Darby Sabini, and Brilliant Chang were all real people, albeit not really side-parts in the inexorable rise of one Birmingham family. There’s plenty of colourful characters from 1930s America who’d slip right in.

 

3. Peaky Berliners

The fact that the show’s chronology is creeping ever-closer to the Second World War hasn’t gone unnoticed. Notably, in 2020, there were rumours that Rowan Atkinson had been cast in the role of comedy German dictator Adolf Hitler. The producers called the news “completely false” – but this was only a denial that Atkinson was cast, not a denial that the story would involve Hitler.

It’s hard to imagine that a production which leapt at the chance to feature Winston Churchill, and whose last season made much of the late-1920s rise of fascism, could possibly resist the temptation to have a Bohemian corporal with a toothbrush moustache ranting and raving down the camera. Or, indeed, to have him bellowing at Cillian Murphy in one of those tense two-handers.

Everything I’ve said above about playing Capone goes ten times over for Hitler, which is probably why Atkinson sounded like such a plausible addition. It’s been an iconic screen role ever since 1940, when Charlie Chaplin played the thinly disguised ‘Adenoid Hynkel’ in The Great Dictator, and like it or not the world’s most evil man has been a cartoon figure ever since. One of the more robust memes of modern times is a clip from the 2004 film Downfall, where Bruno Ganz’s Hitler throws a tantrum.

So the film’s big trip could just as easily be over to Weimar Germany rather than Depression-era America – although this doesn’t necessarily mean going straight into the Second World War. In fact, that would be throwing an opportunity away. Before the Nazis got their meathooks on the levers of power in Germany, they were little more than a street gang, a pack of angry, sharply dressed gutter brawlers. You know, just like the Blinders themselves. Again, here is a ready-made opportunity for the Blinders to beat, stab, and shoot with reckless abandon and still come out as the good guys.

 

4. A Royal Affair

While Peaky Blinders began as a tale of gritty street crime, it didn’t take the show at all long to fall from its gritty Small Heath origins and end up doing jewel heists for Russian nobles and having Tommy become a Member of Parliament.

The fourth season was, by most people’s reckoning, attempting to tone this down, although Knight has been cheerfully blasé about the Shelbys’ social climbing, and admitted he ultimately wants to have Tommy become “Sir Thomas Shelby”. And this, of course, opens the door to include yet more major historical figures. They’ve already had him meet Churchill, so what’s next? Have him go for drinks with the royal family?

Well, yes. And the mid-’30s timing presents a particularly interesting royally based plotline, namely the brief reign of Edward VIII. Edward was the sort of colourful figure that Peaky Blinders revels in. He was notorious for having affairs with married women, and his own father, George V, thought him utterly unsuited for the throne – but is probably most famous for abdicating in order to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson.

Since his stint as King lasted a little under a year, this might have been one of those amusing historical footnotes, if it wasn’t for another salient fact that plays directly into the whole seething mess of the 1930s: both Eddie and Wallie were close friends with a lot of the top Nazis. For this reason, ‘what if Edward had stayed king’ has always been one of the great historical what-could-have-beens, and not in a good way.

Now, the Blinders are almost singularly badly suited to negotiating the delicate process of a politically sensitive abdication. This is what would make it so much fun to watch. As Tommy gently explains why Edward needs to listen to his heart and not his pal Goering, Arthur is in the background getting drunk and hitting someone. Meanwhile, can the twice-widowed Polly possibly stop Edward from thirsting after her?

The way I’ve phrased it is probably a bit more drawing-room farce than Peaky Blinders should be. Still, it’s got the higher stakes that would be needed for a film. And the basic plot beats would seamlessly fit into the show’s tried-and-tested formula of introducing a big, sexy new threat, tit-for-tat feuding between them and the Blinders, oh no, it looks like they’ve got the better of Tommy, can he possibly turn this around, yes he can, hooray.

 

5. Historical Figure Mad-Libs

Having established some of the major real-life figures who might turn up, why not run a bit wild with it? It’s the big movie finale, there’s no need to be coy, no need to gin up excitement for the next one – now they can just go all out. So why not double down, and blend some of these wacky scenarios together?

Fiction can always play fast and loose with history, but there is no other A-list TV production I know of which is seriously likely to – with a halfway straight face, even – have Al Capone get into a fistfight with Adolf Hitler. Call it implausible if you like, but that’s a charge that can be and has been laid on Peaky Blinders’ doorstep before. And guess what, it doesn’t put people off so long as the events are still exciting and the people still look cool.

The florid world of the Peaky Blinders has always used real-life history not so much as a basis, but rather as a starting point. There really was a Birmingham street gang called the Peaky Blinders, who wore razors in their caps, but the idea that they were headed by a clan of handsome, charismatic antiheroes is all fiction – but also very helpful from a storytelling perspective.

In the same way, did the real Peaky Blinders go on jewel heists for Russian aristocrats and do wetwork for Winston Churchill? Did they chutney. But there is a grain of truth to these plots: at the time, Churchill really was a major political player, and there really were plenty of Russian aristocrats knocking about Europe having fled the Soviets. The writers have looked at the historical events of the day and bolted them together in a merry, rough-and-ready fashion, and it’s only gone and worked.

So the show really wouldn’t need too much of a push to start mixing and matching some of the ideas above. Churchill has a drink with Capone! King George VI kicks Hitler’s head in! FDR wheels himself in at the wrong moment, he doesn’t like that! And then Tommy has to step in and break it up, and of this I am sure, that would be a film event which nobody who saw it would ever, ever forget.

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