DON’T PITY WORKING-CLASS PEOPLE, SAYS PEAKY BLINDERS CREATOR

The lives of working-class people can be “beautiful and glamorous” and they don’t need to be pitied, the creator of Peaky Blinders has said.

Steven Knight was discussing the background of his new TV drama, This Town, which is set in the late 20th-century Midlands and tells the story of a band’s formation against a backdrop of violence.

Speaking to Radio Times, the 64-year-old British screenwriter said: “As with Peaky, the first thing I said to the directors was this isn’t: ‘What a shame, these poor, working-class people!’ This is beautiful and glamorous – it’s the Wild West, it’s mythology.

“If you live at the top of a tower block you can see the whole world, you see the curve of the Earth. Look at those places with a certain mindset and they’re bloody gorgeous.”

Knight, who is the son of a Midlands blacksmith, has become an authority on engaging with Birmingham’s history and crime world through television, as he did with the portrayal of Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders.

This Town, which airs on Sunday, grapples with his own history of growing up just outside the city.

“It’s the era I’ve lived through,” he said, adding: “But, like Peaky, it’s still about trying to find the universal in one’s own backyard. The human story.”

The new six-part series and original story is set amid the social unrest of 1981, including mass unemployment and the threat of Irish Republican violence, and follows four young people as they navigate the world of music.

It stars newcomer Levi Brown in the lead alongside the Peaky Blinders actor Jordan Bolger, Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery and Line of Duty’s Ben Rose.

Knight says that the protagonist’s character reflects the confidence that working-class people had that they would succeed at the time, explaining: “There was a huge amount of arrogance and inexperience amongst working-class people at that time; an idea that there was no pre-existing definition of what you are and what you could achieve – you could just do what you want.

“That seems to have disappeared now,” he added.

Meanwhile, Dockery told Radio Times that she has been able to showcase her singing voice in the new show.

When she’s not acting, the 42-year-old performs in Michael & Michelle, the band she formed with her Downton Abbey co-star Michael Fox.

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2024-03-26T07:01:17Z dg43tfdfdgfd