The Peaky Blinders aesthetic has been enthusiastically taken up by many men around the country. Flat cap, tweedy three-piece, undercut hair - it's a solid look.

Oh, and if you're following Tommy Shelby and the gang religiously, you need to have at least one cigarette in your mouth at all times. Your lungs, your doctor and your flat deposit won't thank you, but that's the deal. Those lads really blast through their cigs. But how many cigs do the actors have to chuff their way through on set?

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"Let me show you my lungs," Helen McCrory, who plays Aunt Polly, said when she was asked exactly that at a screening and Q&A at the BFI on the South Bank last night.

Cillian Murphy has to pick up a lot of the smoking slack, though. "Cillian apparently, and I can't remember which season, the props guys reckoned about a thousand," McCrory said.

"But no actors were killed in the making of Peaky Blinders," McCrory added. "We don't inhale."

Is that how it works? That doesn't feel like it'd do a great deal to stop you getting mouth or tongue cancer, but at the same time Allen Carr's The Easy Way To Stop Smoking was still about 60 years off and Birmingham had yet to open even one vape shop by 1929, so options were limited. Perhaps the gang could move into bootlegging off-brand Champix in season five.

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