A Blinding farewell: Peaky gang doff their caps to lost star Helen McCrory, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS as he watches the the opening of the hit show’s finale season
Peaky Blinders, Series 6, Ep. 1
BBC1, last night
Rating: 
A man walks into a bar in the roughest, toughest town in the world and orders a glass of water.
This sounds like the set-up for a joke – but it’s the beginning of the end for Peaky Blinders (BBC1).
Writer Steven Knight’s incomparably stylish, surreally gory gangster drama returned for its final series without even pausing for the opening credits or their ominous theme tune, Nick Cave’s thunderous Red Right Hand.
A fragmented blur of images from the previous season strobed across the screen, as though central character Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy) was watching his life flash before his eyes.
The sound of his dying first wife’s last laboured breaths echoed deafeningly in his ears and, ankle-deep in mud like the battlefields of Flanders where Tommy lost his sanity, he screamed and raised a revolver to his brains.
That’s where we left him last time, in 2019. This time, he pulled the trigger. The gun was empty – his brother Arthur (Paul Anderson), who loves him, took the bullets.
His second wife Lizzie, who despises him, stormed through the mud in her satin pyjamas to throw the bullets at his head and call him a coward.
For any viewer coming newly to the show, this blizzard of heavily stylised images might have seemed incomprehensible.
Don’t worry. Everyone feels like that when they first encounter Peaky Blinders. When the drama debuted on BBC2 in 2013, it appeared to be an incongruous mix of heavy rock soundtrack, historical fantasy, comic book villains and balletic violence in slow motion, with a double handful of the supernatural.
Writer Steven Knight’s incomparably stylish, surreally gory gangster drama returned for its final series without even pausing for the opening credits or their ominous theme tune, Nick Cave’s thunderous Red Right Hand
It is still all those things but, after half a dozen episodes, the clashing elements combine in a hypnotic collage – like one of those eye-watering kaleidoscopic paintings that coalesce into a three-dimensional portrait, if you gaze at them long enough.
Telly snobs will tell you they’ve been hooked from the start but the truth is that the first two series drew small audiences. It was not until the show aired on Netflix that it found its fanbase.
Today it is so popular that, after this concluding season, a movie is planned. Tragically, that will go ahead without the central figure of Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly. The 52-year-old mother-of-two who was married to actor Damian Lewis died last year following a secret battle with cancer.
Her absence might have prompted the decision to dispense with music and titles. Instead, we watched Tommy slit open a body bag, sent by IRA mobsters who murdered Polly for reasons unexplained. Tommy’s grief seemed unfeigned. He knelt and sobbed over her.
Murphy has said: ‘Helen was my closest colleague on Peaky, and one of the finest actors I’ve ever worked opposite. Any material, any scene… she made it special. She could do power and vulnerability, one after the other.’
In a long funeral sequence, Polly’s wooden caravan was torched with her body and all her possessions inside, in tribute to the family’s gypsy roots. At the end of the hour, a caption dedicated the episode to McCrory’s memory. Once again, there was no music – this time, only birdsong.
With Polly dead and Arthur a hopeless opium addict, all the emphasis now falls on Tommy. Previously, he was not only a whisky smuggler and an arms dealer but a rising MP.
Telly snobs will tell you they’ve been hooked from the start but the truth is that the first two series drew small audiences. It was not until the show aired on Netflix that it found its fanbase
His political career appears to have been abandoned but his feud with cousin Michael (Finn Cole), Polly’s son, has not. Tommy arranged for Michael to be jailed on drugs charges and then made a start on the slow seduction of his wife, the doll-like American moll Gina (Anya Taylor-Joy).
She’s straight from the pages of a story by the chroniclers of the Jazz Age, John O’Hara or Damon Runyon.
Tommy himself is more Gary Cooper in a cowboy role written by a miserable French philosopher. When he stalked into that Canadian bar and announced his name, ‘Je m’appelle Thomas Shelby,’ this might have been High Noon reimagined by Jean-Paul Sartre. A brief discussion on the meaning of life followed with the locals, a bunch of depressive existentialists. ‘Since I foreswore alcohol, I’ve become a calmer and more peaceful person,’ Tommy explained, before drawing a knife and a gun.
In the ensuing melee, a man’s face was slashed and a pigeon shot dead. Everyone was trying to make teetotaller Tommy rescind his pledge. Gina sniggered as she waved a balloon glass of brandy under his nose. A Boston thug filled a tumbler with battery acid hooch and ordered him to down it. Tommy refused. ‘I now realise that whisky is just fuel for the loud engines inside your head,’ he said, before quoting William Blake.
For now, he’s on the horse-drawn wagon. How long before he tumbles off is anyone’s guess. But when he does, there’ll be all hell to pay.
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