Peaky Blinders (BBC)

Knight explains: “The reason it came to me was that my parents grew up in Birmingham in the 20s. My mum, when she was nine years old, was a bookie’s runner; they used to use kids to take bets because it was all illegal. My dad’s uncle was part of the Peaky Blinders. It was reluctantly delivered, but my family did give me little snapshots, of gypsies and horses and gang fights and guns, and immaculate suits.

One of the first stories that inspired me was of my dad when he was a little kid, sent to deliver a message. There was a table, covered in money and guns, surrounded by blokes, beautifully dressed, drinking beer from jam jars. You didn’t buy glasses. You only spent money on clothes.”

This atmosphere is captured wonderfully in Peaky Blinders. The gang’s control in Birmingham has a Wild West quality, where the violence is instrumental and strategic, never savage or incidental, and the rules of society are being broken and remade in front of you.

But their lives are burdened by far more than the pressures of self-interest. The casualties of the First World War are everywhere: men who had survived the bullets, but would go to their graves before post-traumatic stress was recognised. The authorities were no good to these shell-shocked men: if anyone was going to watch over them, it would have been men like the Peaky Blinders.

The war and its aftermath are dealt with in an original and oblique way, as a hangover that nobody would acknowledge, but everybody had. Knight says that a load of clichés dominate how this interwar period is played out in drama: “We tiptoe towards things because we’re afraid of being seen to be glamorising or mythologising anything. If it’s post-First World War, it’s all officers shooting themselves. Or it’s flappers, being done in the way flappers have always been done. But why would they behave like that? It was only a couple of years before then that you couldn’t show an ankle, and suddenly they were in really short skirts. Why? Because they didn’t give a damn.”

As grim as the period must have been, from the distance of decades this is a transfixing time, decadent and bacchanalian, traumatised and anti-authoritarian, deeply political, desperate for things to be different, but petrified of change. “I think there was a loss of faith in technology: before the war, there was this belief that every new discovery meant more progress.

Then nations just took all they’d learnt and used it to destroy each other,” says Knight. “The idea of the King’s authority became a joke, for a while, because people in power had been sending 60,000 men to their deaths every morning and the blokes knew it was pointless. They’d get the order [to go over the top], and think, ‘No, you’ve made a mistake, there are machine guns, and we’re going to get killed.’”

Alongside that anarchic hatred of authority there was a real hunger for change, a genuine Communist movement, and the authorities were terrified. One always forgets that this could ever have been a feature of the landscape, here – that a government could ever believe in the people being revolutionary, or that anybody could ever have that appetite for upheaval. But the threat was both real and perceived. A policeman’s strike in 1919 lent ballast to the idea that the old world order had no defenders left. I always think of the persecution of Communists as an American disease, a short-lived, collective madness. But it’s wrong to think Britain didn’t suffer this paranoia.

“Men were arrested for sedition and sentenced to six years for speaking in public about Communism,” says Knight.

“They were taken away and beaten up. I remember my dad saying a bloke would stand up and talk about the Russian Revolution and they’d grab him, put him in a van and you wouldn’t see him again. You think, that’s not what it says in the books. But when you do research, get papers from the period, you realise this is what happened. It’s a secret history.”

Predictably, with a paranoid government and the impossibility of telling a revolutionary from a malcontent, life became very restrictive, close to a police state. Knight’s vivid memory is of his grandfather. “He was wounded in the Somme, so he had a bullet in his shoulder his whole life. I remember my dad telling me that in 1926 he opened his door and there were British soldiers stationed there, pointing machine guns at his front door. And he’d just given everything to his country. These were people just like us, you know. They were no different to us, inside.”