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In the end, Peaky Blinders got the send-off it deserved. The sixth season paid tribute to the late Helen McCrory, rounded off the ongoing war between Tommy Shelby and brother Michael – we can talk about how convinced anyone was that Tommy wouldn’t win, but anyway – and landed on a final shot of Tommy doing Tommy things having realised he wasn’t actually dying after all. It was a plot! Possibly involving Hitler!
There were some loose ends that never turned into much, like that whole storyline with the American bloke who stabbed a guy in the knackers and then melted away, and it might have been nice to get to know wee Ruby before she carked it. But it did most things it needed to, and did them while having one eye on the long-promised film too.
Now though the Peaky gears are creaking into motion again. There was the not particularly cryptic statement from showrunner Steven Knight on the 10-year anniversary a couple of weeks back. “It hardly seems believable that it’s 10 years since Tommy Shelby first rode that black horse through the streets of Birmingham,” Knight wrote. “The phenomenal global success of the show is down to the brilliant and hard work of the loyal team that makes it happen. Ten years on and the story is not yet over. Watch this space.”
And, if you’re on Instagram, you’ll perhaps already know that Paul Anderson, who played Tommy’s brother Arthur, has started his own Peaky-themed Instagram broadcast channel called ‘By Order Of…’ and administered by Anderson and his digital manager Nav Salimian. (Salimian also appears to have founded a clothing brand making some quite – ahem – zhuzh-y suits.) The channel isn’t really doing much breadcrumbing at the minute, just a picture from Anderson’s grid of Arthur lighting a gigantic cigar, then a contact sheet of headshots, and the message “Wishing you all a blessed day” with a saluting emoji. It’s cryptic.
Rounding off a series then coming back for a one-off story is a very, very hard thing to pull off. Usually these things need a few different factors to click if they’re going to work. Most obviously, it needs a reason to exist. Plenty of TV series have farted out a movie for the sake of it, and Peaky really shouldn’t be one of them.
It also needs to run pretty hard on the heels of the main series. That’s partly because of the third thing the movie needs: a motivated fanbase who are going to razz up the whole enterprise. To anticipate it, interpret it, and possibly get into arguments with other fandoms over it.
The fandom aspect is the bit that now makes a show or movie feel like it’s actually happening and has some purchase in the world. But the Peaky fanbase is quite different to the ones that follow Succession or Game of Thrones or The Last of Us. There’s an enthusiasm in those fandoms for drilling right down into characters’ psyches and mining the information we’re given from camera moves, editing choices and production design to navigate how each individual character is feeling and reacting to what’s happening in the story-space.
That is not the experience of being in the Peaky fandom. By and large, it’s not one which tends to produce fan theories or take apart scenes frame by frame; it’s more vibe-based TV fandom, and one more inclined to follow the story wherever it goes rather than throwing around counterfactuals and second-guessing what Knight has in mind.
Most Peaky fans seem happy to sit back and be taken on a rollercoaster ride, albeit a rollercoaster ride which is 30 per cent slow-motion. It’s actually quite a pleasant throwback to the way in which people used to discuss TV and film before the Redditification of fan discourse. It is not serious business. It’s people posting pictures of their ‘BY ORDER OF THE PEAKY BLINDERS’ mug or some quite derivative artwork of apes wearing three-piece suits captioned ‘Monkey Blinders’, plus occasional innocent enquiries as to why Tommy was having seizures if his tumour wasn’t real in the end.
The reason I raise this is that even those relatively chilled-out fans seemed a bit perturbed by the ponderous pace of the middle of the last series, and consider the whole thing pretty much cauterised. The Peaky kids who were introduced in season six aren’t being weighed up and played off against each other in feverish previews of where the film might go. There is no Duke Shelby hive. The idea of Tommy Shelby going to war – he’d be about 50 by the outbreak of conflict, so he ain’t going to be parachuting into Market Garden – was a popular one, and a showdown with Sam Claflin’s Oswald Mosley at the direction of Tommy’s occasional M figure Winston Churchill seems the most likely route into that.
But these are not things that anyone in the fandom is really talking about at the moment. There’s no real whirl of excitement or speculation right now. And Peaky Blinders really needs that to crank back up again if it’s going to make this movie, which we’ve known about for absolutely ages now, land with the impact which really befits it.
It’s got Cillian Murphy as its lead, for heaven’s sake. Drop a teaser. Leak a behind the scenes snap. Let Knight be a little bit indiscreet about it in an interview. Give us a crumb of something soon, before the last of the momentum runs out. Because if this is the last we ever see of the Shelbys and the Peaky Blinders gang, they ought to be swaggering into the sunset.
