PEAKY BLINDERS III

My son pointed out that my favourite truly dreadful 'pop video' 'Peaky Blinders' is back for a third series. As ever I appear to be a lone critical voice. A wholly spurious historically inaccurate fantasy with a burgeoning soundtrack including the ever maudlin Nick Cave, hipsters the Arctic Monkeys and Radiohead is not something anyone could have predicted as a recipe for success but the charisma and mesmerisingly handsome lead in Cillian Murphy seems awful slim pickings to hang another entire series run on. 

What do I know? So be it, never underestimate the power of the female audience for tripe and the sexist attraction of an actor as handsome as Murphy but I find it difficult to trust any man who is prettier than all the female cast combined. The writing continues to be trite, confused, dull and rather fanciful for something purportedly about gritty life in Brumagum's Small Heath. But then it is written by Steven Knight the man who brought you 'Who Wants To Be a Millionaire'? And wrote for Jasper Carrot'! No, really!

The sets have always troubled me too being straight out of some ersatz pop vid portraying working folk. The sanitised streets, the charcoal road surfaces really bother me, they look hand carved in dark chocolate crumb but then I have been watching far too much Masterchef and the queasy soft focus slow-mo effects continue to be matched only by the preposterously pretty costumes. And that's just the men!

Although quite what dreadlocked Professor Benjamin Zephaniah is doing acting as the Christian minister clearly on the side of a gang of murderous thugs when Birmingham had scant ethnic African community prior to the Windrush arrival in 1948 is anyone's guess. Still the soundtrack is going to include some David Bowie later on Murphy tells us as he was a fan (if only of the costumes). Which is nice. . . .

The accents continue to waver all over the countryside like a drunk on a slide trombone Murphy stating recently and somewhat engagingly how much he values the Brummies restraint in their criticism but at least we are shot of Sam Neil's cod Irishman who appears to have begged to be let go as his character was shot some episodes ago. 

We start off Series III to find our hero Tommy Shelby pending his execution into an open grave and being let free otherwise the story would have been blessedly short. The notion that these were grown ups capable of negotiating with the Irish Republicans let alone the New York gangsters of the day is lamentably laughable.

The haircuts continue to astonish and must have a budget all of their own. Quite how what passes for a short back and sides could end up so preposterously modern is beyond belief but here we are in the mid twenties when the real Blinder gangs had long gone so accuracy was never going to encumber this nonsense. 

The Real Peaky Blinders 

The reinvented flat cap of the poor and working class in the nation still holds the gaze as it has been replaced by the American Newsboys cherry on a cake confection of a cap on all heads bar a few. The silk scarves for which they were known replaced with elegant silk ties and wing collars. There is of course no evidence the razor in the peak was anything other than myth building amongst what was in truth a gang of violent unruly children (the only culprit of gang crime in the area guilty of any more than stealing bikes to order was someone in possession of a gun at the ripe old age of 13!) 

Cillian Murphy they were NOT!

The swearing also troubles me and for the sheer amount of effing and jeffing it was I believe something that the Chauvinism of the day would allow no self respecting working class man to do in front of a woman but seeing as Auntie Pol, the beautiful Helen McCrory lost, totally wasted and underused here, is the worst offender I cannot but admire it's equal handed er, 'feminist' balance.

Still lessons learnt from elsewhere and the female viewers were not to be denied their ounce of flesh and Our Cillian did a Tom Hiddleston from The Night Manager and obligingly showed them his bottom so for the first episode at least all was well in the world of sneaky peaking.