Peaky Blinders: Season 4 – Episode 1 ‘The Noose’ REVIEW

The BBC’s gang-violence drama Peaky Blinders is back, and not before time. After the last series left us on quite a cliffhanger – the old bill banging their way into Tommy’s palatial crime-mansion and arresting his nearest and dearest after he’d struck some particularly foul deal with the government, this series opens by resolving all that in record time.

As the rest of the major Shelbys are marched off to the gallows, we discover – alongside one of the top judges in the land – that Tommy has hold of some top blackmail material on the king himself. Without even being there, he leverages this to stop the gang from being executed for crimes they absolutely did commit, and, just for fun, to get himself an OBE – otherwise known as ‘a gong’, or the title of ‘Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’.

So, yes, the gang’s reached some fairly dizzying heights – and while the political intrigue that goes to the heart of government is reserved for Tommy himself, when we rejoin the narrative proper a year later, they all now have incredibly large and nice houses. To the point that a first-time viewer tuning in might mistake it for Downton Abbey until the first use of the word ‘fook’. And the theme’s reference to ‘where the viaduct looms’, which was more or less spot-on in the heart of industrial Birmingham with factories and works towering in the background, now falls a little flat.

Luckily Tommy knows this as well as we do, and breaks off the important business of drinking and prostitutes to arrange a family meeting back in Small Heath. And the reason? Those letters they’re all getting with the jaunty air mail insignia are nothing to do with Ada’s triumphant return from America, rather they’re from the mafia – that more famous and photogenic organised crime group. And this hints at a return of previous antagonist Derby Sabini, played by the underrated Noah Taylor, who I hope it isn’t rude to say just has a naturally evil face.

Currently, however, the Italian mob’s being fronted by Adrien Brody’s Luca Changretti, out for revenge after the horrible deaths of his father and brother last series. While he hasn’t had a lot of face-time yet beyond a tense moment at customs, a name as big as his is sure to have some interesting scenes to get his teeth into. Brody isn’t the only major name to join the cast, though – it’s been confirmed that Aiden Gillen will be turning up, very possibly as a scheming type with a ridiculous accent.

The Shelby reunion runs straight into the face of – in fact, is made necessary by – the other major source of tension in play, that following the trickery with the criminal justice system Tommy is now estranged from the rest of the family. And so far it’s unclear just how voluntary that is. Esme is of the opinion John should rip his guts on just on principle, but on the other hand poor old Arthur just seems to miss him. Polly also blames Tommy a lot, but has other concerns – the literal near-death experience of a narrowly stayed execution is cracking her up a bit, and she’s hearing the voices of the dead. Thus far she’s keeping it all at bay via booze and a lot of pills.

All told, Polly does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the tragic moments – and unfortunately, this new slide into non-specific insanity seems a bit stereotypically ethereal and girly, particularly compared with the frighteningly intimate depictions of Tommy’s PTSD and the sad story of Danny Whizz-Bang back in series one. But given that she joined in with a women’s labour march last series – something they didn’t make much of – she may have a new ally in Jessie Eden, a union leader who petitions Tommy for equal pay and gets a quintessential chummy not-legally-threat in response.

Awkwardly, the leap back into the mean streets and back into action coincides with Christmas – and Tommy, Arthur, and John are of course now good family men, with Arthur still halfway out of the game due to the influence of his Christian wife. Tommy does his best to get Christmas dinner ready – with the other Shelbys having their own spreads, he’s invited Johnny Dogs and the clan. But then it becomes tragically apparent that the mafia don’t actually care that much about Christian festivals and family togetherness, in contrast to popular media such as The Godfather in which the mafia were the good guys.

The episode ends on another cliffhanger, this time involving two main characters and a hail of bullets. I say ‘cliffhanger’, both catch many shots in the chest, but the fanbase are already abuzz with wild-eyed theories about how they might have survived (they were like this with Tommy’s wife Grace in the last series, too.) In spite of this, though, a triumphant return for tv’s most photogenic Brummies. With three series already under its belt, there are some formulaic aspects to Peaky Blinders – each previous serious involved the gang hitting a low point when it seems all is lost before Tommy swings something – but it’s all done so well you can live with that.

And after the high-level intrigue of the previous series – involving exiled Russian nobles, evil priests, rogue elements of the British establishment and Mr Churchill himself – a return to gritty gang scraps could be just the ticket. Personally I’m hoping for a return of Tom Hardy’s psoriatic Jewish mobster Alfie Solomons – a cheerfully amoral type with an accent so thick you could insulate houses with it, and crucially, rival to Sabini.