A brief review of Peaky Blinders

I’ve started having dreams where I forget to wear masks indoors. It’s the pandemic equivalent of the “naked in the middle of the cafeteria” dream.

Over the last few weeks, I breezed through the violent, charismatic, intolerable tragicomedy that is the first five seasons of Peaky Blinders. Cillian Murphy, man… what a beautiful man; a human embodiment of a White Walker. I didn’t think I’d feel this way about him before I started, but here we are. He makes me feel… I don’t exactly know how what; I just know it’s different to any other fictional character (and we all do have certain strong feelings about characters, despite objections that they are fictional). I wanted to look away every time he came onscreen; portending doom of some kind. But I couldn’t tear my eyes away: part curiosity about Tom Shelby’s new plan, part awe of the performance. Don’t get me wrong; the whole show is a soap opera. The plotlines are full of twists and deus ex machinas; people are raised from the dead. But Cillian Murphy as Tom Shelby, man. His touch is frozen and liable to turn you into a private in an army of zombies. And you find your limbs are not your own.

(Annabelle Wallis though, as the love of his life, is terrible. Sorry; she’s wooden here. A killer guest cast though.)

Anyway. I’m no television critic so what the fuck do I know. I just know that I’ve also started dreaming of the Peaky Blinders, in slightly debaucherous, weirdly immersive situations. High-ceilinged hardwood rooms in English manors where the Shelby gypsy family now find themselves in. Dinner parties verging on the gauche; velvet corsets and ribbons, whores as maids. The smell of gunpowder and sex in the air (I assume; I didn’t smell it in my dream but it just seemed the type). You want to hide under a table in case the shooting starts, but also join the party (it seems like a fun party). Yes, there are no smells I can remember in my dream, but it’s full of them, and I guess that’s what I miss most in this pandemic. The smog of towns and cities; the dinkiness. The smell of things, of people and their sweat, their feelings. My pets smell great, my husband too, but man, I miss the mundanity of other vapours.