How do you follow Peaky Blinders? By giving 1980s Midlands a glamorous, Wild West makeover, says Steven Knight
Easter Special This Town Easter Day 9.00pm, Easter Monday 9.00pm BBC1
Steven Knight’s new drama opens with a bang. It’s 1981, Birmingham’s youth is up in arms and petrol bombs are raining on the streets of Handsworth. Only Dante, a mixedrace teenager with a dead mother, recovering-alcoholic father and older brother in Belfast with the British Army, isn’t rioting. Like the 13th-century Italian poet whose name he shares, Dante is mourning a lost love. Though here she’s alive, is called Fiona – not Beatrice – and works in a Sutton Coldfield record shop.
We’re back in Peaky Blinders territory. Half a century after Tommy Shelby’s ruthless advance through Birmingham’s crime world, Knight has extended his reach out of the city and into a late 20th-century Midlands bounded by motorways, blighted by mass unemployment, and overshadowed by the threat of Irish Republican violence.
If Peaky Blinders was the screenwriter’s engagement with his grandparent’s history, This Town is about his own, having grown up just outside Birmingham. “It’s the era I’ve lived through,” says Knight, who turns 65 on 1 April. “But, like Peaky, it’s still about trying to find the universal in one’s own backyard. The human story.”
Through the gaze of Dante – played by an assured Levi Brown – we come to see this apparently bleak world of tower blocks and flyovers as a magical space, alive with possibilities. “That was the idea,” says Knight, the son of a Midlands blacksmith. “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.”
Nonetheless, it’s a wonderland prickling with threat. Like Peaky, this is violent drama, the violence dealt out variously by skinheads, gangsters, Birmingham City football hooligans, the British Army, an active service unit of the IRA and Special Branch.
As the best dramatists often do, Knight reminds us that we have forgotten something; in this case that the Troubles in Ireland were also fought in Great Britain, especially in the Midlands. Dante’s cousin Bardon Quinn (Ben Rose) finds himself torn by his father’s commitment to Republican violence, while Dante’s brother Gregory (Jordan Bolger) is confronted by IRA men in a local bar.
“If you’re doing period television, then ask what was actually happening then,” Knight says. “I remember, in Birmingham, you’d go into a pub and be looking around for a plas
