There's no getting away from it: Peaky Blinders (BBC Two, Thursday) is the daftest, most unlikely name for a vicious mob drama, never mind one that's set in Birmingham in 1919. It has historical roots – the Peaky Blinders were a gang in Victorian Britain so named because of the razors sewn into the peaks of their caps – but the action has been moved for dramatic purposes to the end of the first World War, when working men returned from the front to very different lives. It looks fantastic and expensive in its historical accuracy; the BBC is unbeatable at this sort of thing.
The surreal opening scene sees Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy) riding bareback on his horse into town – or rather the grimy industrial heart of Birmingham which is his racketeering crime family’s fiefdom. As he clip-clops by, women and children run and hide, men avert their gaze and flames belch from factories, lighting up the atmospheric darkness while a blues soundtrack gives an American feel. Then a sheriff rides into town – Chief Inspector Campbell (Sam Neill) with a full-on Belfast accent and a puritanical zeal. He comes by train, where he has an on-board meeting with Winston Churchill and promises to clean up Birmingham and find a stash of weapons bound for Libya (what?) which have been stolen. The plot complexities grow with every scene. It turns out that Shelby had inadvertently taken the cache but, now that he has it, he sees it as the chance to grow his business from small-time gambling and protection to something far more lucrative.
But then a duff scene throws the carefully structured atmosphere of gangster menace so off-kilter it never quite recovers. A pretty Irish girl, Grace (Annabelle Wallis) persuades the owner of the blood-and-sawdust-on-the-floor local to employ her as a barmaid by belting out a few plaintive bars of Carrickfergus. All the other women are in period costume; she looks like Taylor Swift. She's a police informer, and it's only a matter of time before she infiltrates the Peaky Blinders by catching the eye of Shelby, who is shell-shocked, addicted to drugs, and supposedly off the ladies entirely.
Some scenes are grittily realistic, others stylised, and the Western tropes are a further layer to grapple with. So yes, there was a lot going on (and I haven't even gotten to the Bolsheviks and the Fenian/IRA dimension), and it's difficult to see how the various strands can be satisfactorily explored, never mind resolved, in just six episodes. HBO's Prohibition-era gangster drama Boardwalk Empire – to which Peaky Blinders bears more than a passing resemblance – had 12 episodes in its first season and, on season four, it's still teasing out some of the storylines in its powerful pilot episode.
The performances in Peaky Blinders, though, are magnetic, particularly Murphy, Paul Anderson as his brother Arthur, and Sam Neill as the vicious police enforcer.
Real-life birth scenes are now as much a staple of prime-time telly as cookery shows, and Midwives (Wednesday), TV3's excellent observational documentary series following birth stories in the National Maternity hospital, is a good example of the fertile genre. Happily, the cameras stay mostly out of the labour ward and away from the business end of birth, concentrating instead on the feelings and fears of women and how they're cared for by the hospital.
The midwives, as ever, come across as the sort of capable, smart people you'd happily trust your life with, although curiously they don't seem to run things to the same extent as they do in the UK. In The Midwives (BBC Two, Tuesday) it was all midwives helping in the births; doctors are only called in if there's a medical problem. In the Irish programme, we saw doctors doing routine checks. On average 25 babies are born a day in Holles Street hospital and the women who agreed to be interviewed were open and generous with their participation. Midwives doesn't bring anything new to the genre but, as every birth is different, there's plenty of scope for good stories. Director Michelle Lynch told them well with a cool detachment.
I watched an entire sports programme – something of a personal record – even though Second Captains (RTÉ Two, Tuesday), RTÉ's new sports programme, couldn't be more blokeish. It's relaxed – skittish even – more like a chat show with a sports theme and comedy bits than a topical sports programme. Viewers might reasonably have expected a dissection of the hurling final or even the Ireland v Austria match that ended just before Second Captains began; given the fallout from that game, it looks odd that the lads spent so much time working up the comedy set pieces (which were funny) instead of giving a robust opinion on the matter. So I wonder will proper sports fans feel slightly short-changed by the lack of actual sports news and analysis.
However, the calibre of guests was high and the presenters clearly know their stuff; and, crucially for RTÉ, they're are not the usual suspects. It's presented by the team who had an award-winning show on Newstalk and now a have podcast on the Irish Times website, and it's their lads-just-shooting-the-breeze formula they've brought to TV. The set-up mirrors the BBC's Top Gear, the TV template for all things laddish: the presenters are three blokes, the chatty confident main man (Eoin McDevitt), his straight man who doesn't mind being the butt of jokes (Ciaran Murphy), and the shaggy-haired mortified-to-be-on-telly one (Ken Early). The audience – mostly male – stand around the barn of a studio looking on at the interviews, which take place on sagging, mismatched sofas. Many have beer bottles in hand; the branding is obvious – you wouldn't get that on the BBC.
There was a strong interview with Ronan O'Gara, who was particularly interesting about his new friendship with Jonny Sexton and his move to Paris as a junior coach.
Only four episodes of Second Captains have been commissioned – it's hard to see it ending there.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
