Wordless Wednesday: The Real Peaky Blinders

A Prayer Before Dawn (2018)

"...Starring as Billy Moore is Joe Cole, a former National Youth Theatre player and Screen International Star of Tomorrow recipient. Cole has been no slouch in the past few years, notching up impressive credits from his breakout role as John Shelby in the hit BBC period crime drama Peaky Blinders to a BAFTA-nominated performance in the Black Mirror episode, Hang the DJ. He has even courted Hollywood with roles in last year’s veterans drama Thank You For Your Service and 2015’s cult horror Green Room, but it’s perhaps fair to say that for all that he still isn’t a household name. That slight anonymity actually works in A Prayer Before Dawn‘s favour, because what’s integral to this film is Billy’s foreignness. It is simply Cole’s milk-white torso, rather than the star status of an A-lister, that makes him stand out from the broiling tumult of similarly semi-naked and heavily inked Thai convicts.  As the only westerner and English speaker incarcerated there, the bewilderment and isolation he feels is key to his specific ordeal and this is palpable for the audience too, as we are forced uncomprehending down this hellhole alongside him. The danger he faces, as warders and inmates bark and threaten, is credible in a way that a bigger name with a greater baggage of roles behind him would simply be unable to pull off. We know that just around the corner the trailer is waiting for them…with the lesser known Cole, you can believe he’s actually living this nightmare. This may not be the film that affords him the mainstream commercial breakout that is surely on the horizon, but the kudos it will gain in critical and professional circles is further proof of Cole’s ability to pick his roles well...."

Read my full review at The Geek Show

Churchill Overkill

With Gary Oldman tipped for the Oscar this year for his performance in Darkest Hour, many have proclaimed him to be the definitive Churchill. But, well I don't know about you, but don't you think we've had enough biopics about Winston Churchill now?

We've had Albert Finney in 2002's The Gathering Storm, and Brendan Gleeson in 2009's Into The Storm. We've had Michael Gambon in 2016's Churchill's Secret and Brian Cox in last year's Churchill. We've had Timothy Spall appear as Churchill in The King's Speech from 2010 and John Lithgow as Churchill in Netflix's acclaimed drama series The Crown. We've even had both Andy Nyman and Richard McCabe play him in Peaky Blinders. And all of these are just those of note made in the last 15 years or so, there's plenty more, and (perhaps asides from Peaky Blinders which shows him to be a ruthless horse trader) all of them say the same thing: that Churchill was The Greatest Briton Who Ever Lived™.

Now far be it from me to say that Churchill wasn't a remarkable man who helped obliterate Hitler's dream of a thousand year Reich, but I've always believed that this canonisation of Churchill to be deeply worrying. To my mind, Churchill was simply the right man for the job at the time. In short; he was a wartime prime minister, terrible in peace time. None of these biopics ever explore any other aspect of Churchill's life, character or political career and it's immensely frustrating because they're choosing to ignore a lot of things that need addressing about the man.

Churchill was not a saint and many would struggle to view him heroically. This is a man who said "I hate Indians. They are beastly people with a beastly religion". In 1943 4 millions Bengalis died from a famine he later claimed was their own fault because they "bred like rabbits". 

A year later in 1944 he ordered the British army to open fire on protesters on the streets of Athens, killing 28 civilians and injuring 120. These Greeks were partisans who fought with the British against the Nazis and the reason Churchill turned on them was because he feared their communist tendencies. He supported the right wing Greek government and wanted to see the monarchy restored. He employed former RUC commander Charles Wickham to train Greece's security forces. His actions helped shape the far right movement that continues in Greece to this day. 

His actions in India and Greece were not uncharacteristic either, there's several countries blighted by Churchill's less than saintly character: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Kenya, and South Africa, the latter with its disgusting British run concentration camps and which Churchill argued that black people should be exempted from voting. He was a keen proponent of chemical warfare against Kurds and Afghans, believed in the superiority of white people, and also advocated sterilisation and labour camps for 'degenerate Britons'. Perhaps he considered the striking miners of Tonypandy as degenerates when he sent the troops in to the area  to maintain order in 1910? A decision he made again in Liverpool just a year later - this time the soldiers opened fire, killing two people. Also that year Churchill dabbled in the Sidney Street siege between some 200 police and Latvian anarchists, ordering the police to let the house the gang were hiding in burn down.

You can read more about this less than glorious side to Winston Churchill both here and here.

All I'm saying is if these countless biopics don't address all sides of the man then aren't we just whitewashing his legend? And isn't it time we started bringing the lives of other notable politicians to the screen - where, for example, are the biopics of Clem Attlee or Nye Bevan?

Fact Meets Fiction: Jessie Eden and Peaky Blinders, Part 2

In episode four of season three of Peaky Blinders, there was a mention of Jessie Eden, the real-life Birmingham trade unionist and communist who made her name during the 1926 General Strike. I had previously blogged about this fact meeting fiction moment here, and saw that post gaining much traction in the last fortnight. Well, now I know why: Jessie Eden has become a regular character in the show, making her debut in the season four opening episode which was broadcast on Wednesday. 

Jessie Eden is played by Irish actress Charlie Murphy and her appearance has sparked a lot of interest in the real Jessie, as evinced by articles at Den of Geek and The Guardian, the latter of which features an interview with her daughter-in-law Andrea McCulloch, who had previously posted a message on my earlier blog post.

I was already looking forward to this new season but now, having watched the nail biting first episode and seen Murphy's performance as Eden, I'm looking forward to seeing how it all plays out even more! It's worth pointing out though that, as with the mention of Eden in the last series, writer/creator Steven Knight is playing fast and loose with history once more: Season four commences on Christmas, 1925 and at this point in her life, Jessie Shrimpton (as she was then known, Shrimpton being her maiden name) was only a shop steward of a small number of unionised members rather than the union leader they are depicting her as - that came much later, in 1931, when she led thousands of women out on a week long strike.

Still, it's good to see both an aspect of social and cultural history and a significant figure in trade union history be given the spotlight they have been unfairly kept away from for so long.

Out On Blue Six: London Grammar

London Grammar's haunting stripped back version of Chris Isaak's 1989 hit Wicked Game has been used to great effect in the BBC's trailer for the forthcoming fourth series of Peaky Blinders, which commences this week. I cannot wait to be back with the Shelby Clan, but for now, here's London Grammar...

End Transmission

Fact Meets Fiction : Jessie Eden and Peaky Blinders

Fact met fiction in Peaky Blinders once again this week, as the Shelby women decided to show solidarity by walking out on the Good Friday strike of 1924 with the rest of Birmingham's working women. "Let's go to the Bull Ring"  Helen McCrory's Aunt Polly declared, striding out of the Shelby's illegal gambling den in Small Heath to see Jessie Eden, shop steward at Lucas' Motor Components factory, demand equal sanitation rights for her female members.

Jessie Eden

1902~1986

Unfortunately, the episode didn't actually show us Jessie Eden, or her rally at the Bull Ring, though it is revealed that a drunken Aunt Polly, burdened with guilt at the Shelby's increasing murderous exploits, got very pally with the twenty-two year old firebrand though found her too diplomatic for her tastes!

Peaky Blinders, Series 3 Episode 4;

The Shelby Women discuss Jessie Eden's strike

It appears that Peaky's writer Steven Knight has taken both the 1926 General Strike and a subsequent week-long strike for female workers in January 1931 as his main inspiration here. In reality, the first recorded act of militant unionism that Jessie Shrimpton (her maiden name, and as she was then known) undertook was in the General Strike, which means Knight has used some licence to depict her as politically active some two years prior to what we actually know. It's not the first bending of fact Knight has undertook - many will remember how, in series two, he wrote of Tommy Shelby and Churchill as being active in the British forces at Verdun; a First World War battle that occurred between the French and German armies only.

The General Strike lasted 9 days from 4th May to 13th May, an attempt to force the government to halt wage reduction and worsening conditions for the 1.2 million locked out coal miners. Despite over a million people standing in solidarity and transport and heavy industry being particularly effected, the action proved unsuccessful thanks to a prepared government reaction and the enlisting of middle class volunteers to run services struck by the industrial action. 

For the fiftieth anniversary of the strike, The Birmingham Post interviewed a then 74-year-old Eden - then using her final married name of McCulloch - for her memories of the day she downed tools at Lucas' and led all the women in her section out to join the traditional May Day march onto the streets of Birmingham alongside some 25,000 fellow marchers from across the city.

"When policemen laid hands on trade union tomboy Jessie McCulloch at a workers' meeting in the old Bull Ring during the 1926 General Strike they pretty soon realised they had made a mistake; 'One policeman put his hands on my arm. They were telling me to go home but the crowd howled 'Hey leave her alone' and some men came and pushed the policemen away. They didn't do anything after that. I think they could see that there would have been a riot. I was never frightened of the police or the troops because I had the people with me you see; I don't know what I'd have felt like on my own'"

On strike, the Shelby womenfolk march to the Bull Ring to hear Jessie Evans speak; Peaky Blinders, Series 3, Episode 4.

She soon got a taste of it. In 1931 Jessie went down in history when she led 10,000 Birmingham women out on a week long strike - virtually unheard of at such time. It all started when Lucas' management instigated a time and motion study from America called the Bedaux System, after its creator Charles Eugene Bedaux, which had so impressed factory owner Charles Lucas on a visit to the US. It was universally accepted among the management at Lucas' that Jessie's work filing shock absorbers at the plant was both the quickest and most efficient and the plan was to set the time by her and expect her colleagues to keep up with her. The two Americans brought to Birmingham had even begun to time the women's visits to the toilet and this offensive act spurred Jessie and 140 of the girls into action; refusing to participate in the project, the Americans were chased from the screw machine shop, with one of them taking to the roof! 

Jessie initially went to the AEU (Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union) to ask them to represent her fellow women in this dispute but, whilst the AEU were the most populated and largely Communist union at Lucas' at the time, they did not accept women as members. So instead she turned to the TGWU (Transport and General Workers Union) who promptly signed up the female workforce at her behest. A rank and file committee was duly formed, holding lunchtime meetings at the gates. Numbers increased rapidly and eventually, Jessie led thousands of women out of the gates in an all-out strike. 

With support from other factories and the Birmingham branch of the Communist Party (which Jessie had now joined) Lucas' seemed set for a complete stoppage and an anxious management dropped the Bedaux system as a result.Tasting victory, the jubilant workforce hoisted Jessie up onto their shoulders in celebration. But triumph proved to be short-lived; a 5,000 strong victory march the following day was broken up by Birmingham's Chief Constable who was booed by the procession and arrests of known communists were made in attempts to stage a May Day rally. After a while, cutbacks at the Lucas plant and a vengeful management saw Jessie lose her job. She subsequently received victimisation pay from the union and a gold medal from Ernest Bevin and had so impressed the party that they would sent her to Soviet Russia to help rally the female workers at the Moscow Metro.

Returning to England, Jessie raised her family, remarried and remained politically active, playing a prominent part in the 1939 mass rent strike across the city and would spend much of the war involved in pro-Soviet activity building bridges with the USSR's ambassador and many visiting delegations in an attempt to improve our relationship with Russia. She unsuccessfully stood for council representing the Communist Party in the 1945 election for the Handsworth district, but drew a respectable 3.4% of the vote. She protested against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and remained an active and much respected member of the party until senility struck in the late '70s. She died in 1986 after spending her last years in hospital from heart failure and dementia. She was 84 years old.

For more on Jessie, the Midlands and the Communist Party, visit Graham Stevenson's website.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006)

The return to a film that has always been a bit troublesome for me. I am a huge admirer of Ken Loach as a film maker and share many of his political views, but I find The Wind That Shakes The Barley a problematic watch.

I don't agree with imperialism or with undemocratic fascistic regimes and the brutality doled out by the Black and Tans was obviously an unspeakable savage abhorrence. With that in mind whilst I might have some sympathy for Irish republicanism, the mainland terror campaign of the IRA from the 1970s through to the 1990s - the era I grew up in - has coloured my view of what is clearly a very complicated issue. As such, any film or piece of work that depicts the thorny subject of Ireland from an all too simplistic or biased point of view is one I immediately have problems with - and yes I'm looking at you Paul McCartney and any American film made up until 2001 when the US realised for themselves what terrorism actually meant.

Loach's film may not be the most complex or nuanced of affairs, but it does not really deserve the 'IRA Propaganda' tag the vitriolic British press subsequently gave it ahead of its triumphant award winning screening at Cannes. Significantly, the film explores in its second half the betrayal of the revolution (a tradition in itself we can see time and time again) which stemmed from the birth of the Free State in 1922. In that regard The Wind That Shakes the Barley is not just about the cruel behaviour of the British to preserve their interests in a foreign land, but about how the Irish subsequently behaved - adding a few cruel tricks learnt by their former masters to go alongside their own brand of ruthlessness. Loach and his regular scriptwriter Paul Laverty makes no bones of the fact that their belief is that, when Michael Collins took to the negotiating table with Lloyd George and Churchill, they created a monster whose victim continued to be Ireland.

But I must admit I do not believe the divisions Loach and Laverty draws up in its wake, and when that's the main crux of the film it presents me with something of a problem in what is already a problematic subject. Loach and Laverty's heroes - as brought to life by Cillian Murphy and Liam Cunnigham - take their cue from James Connelly's socialist philosophy, principally that the fight for independence must go hand in hand with the fight for social equality and justice. This of course is something I can totally get behind, but in reality whilst there were some radical socialists in the ranks of the Republican Army, they were few and far between. This schism, that it was therefore a case of either/or, is thus blown out of proportion to fit Loach's usual political narrative - that the socialists and the idealogical hard left are betrayed by the negotiators and compromisers, thus barring the gates to the promised land of social equality for all. It's an easier way of depicting the situation than the more complex one required to tackle the myriad different understandings of republican nationalism that created the divide, and it's exactly the same narrative that featured far more successfully in Loach's 1995 Spanish Civil War epic Land & Freedom. It's not an outright lie, but it is a simplistic view and something of a distortion of the actual truth, something which The Wind That Shakes The Barley does quite often.

Like I said earlier, in depicting the incidents that occur on film, Loach and Laverty aren't actually making anything up but it is interesting to look at what is omitted. Whilst you can argue both sides are depicted can resort easily to savagery, the freedom fighters are painted much more sympathetically in accordance with the film being told from their point of view.  We never actually see the IRA killing policemen (in fact, the only scene which shows them storming a police station ends with them giving the constables there a warning - something which in reality they were scarcely ever given) or local Protestants (who featured large in their bodycount) and we only ever see one compelling instance of them killing an informer in their midst. The film depicts them as guerrillas who only kill as a last resort and always with good reason which has been explored in dialogue to the nth degree beforehand to ensure that the audience can be fully acquainted with their reasons, and their reluctance. In one ambush scene, a troop of Black and Tans are decimated in what is shown to be a fair and equal fight. The likely real-life ambush on which it's closely based however tells a different story; at Kilmichael in County Cork, the IRA finished off their British wounded and surrendered opponents with a clinical ruthless efficiency.

Again you can argue that this is simply a case of an eye for an eye, fair enough - but why not show it as such then? Instead, we see the harrowing aggression of the shouting, foul mouthed, uniformed Black and Tans (and later the Free State Army) being met by the softly spoken, plainclothed pure of heart rebels and the victimised innocents - always shown as women. All that said however, this is still a much more intelligent and absorbing film than the likes of Braveheart or The Patriot, so it would be unfair to lump it together with the weirdly anti-British, seemingly homophobic output of everyone's favourite anti-semite Mel Gibson even though, once suspects, the film will mean the same thing to a wider international audience as those films do.

Speaking at Cannes, Loach said "Our film, we hope, is about the British confronting their imperialist history and maybe if we tell the truth about the past, we will have the truth about the present" His meaning was clear; he wanted to draw parallels between the British colonial occupation of Ireland with Iraq following the Blair/Bush Oil Wars and the state Iraq has subsequently been left in. Perhaps you have to be simplistic with the past to prove a contemporary point? If you can put aside such qualms about historical accuracy and can put aside personal feelings to accept Loach's story it is a rather polished two hours (though it does occasionally sag) which boasts a strong central performance from Cilliam Murphy as a reluctant revolutionary who eventually becomes the fight's most dedicated and committed soul. And that reminds me, the excellent Peaky Blinders starring Murphy as Birmingham gang leader Tommy Shelby returns for a third series tonight at 9pm, BBC2.

Theme Time : Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Peaky Blinders

It's fair to say Peaky Blinders, the BBC2 drama based on the real life Birmingham crime gang of the late 19th and early 20th century, is a gripping way to pass an hour on a Thursday evening. It's also beautifully shot too and, despite it's thoroughly British, 'second city of the UK', setting it owes more to the dark US period drama genre populated by HBO's Boardwalk Empire and Deadwood. Cillian Murphy's Thomas Shelby, the second son and leader of a familial criminal empire which sew razor blades into their peaked caps, is a worthy contender to place alongside the very best in those shows.

The anachronistic theme tune that opens the action each week has more than an air of The Wire's theme, Tom Waits' Way Down In The Hole too

The fourth episode has just aired and despite some stiff competition on Thursday nights  - Educating Yorkshire and, as of next week, Billy Ivory's new drama Truckers and the period medical drama Breathless -  I know I shall remain hooked. Just need to juggle the Sky+!

If you're as hooked as me you may like to find out more about the real figures behind the fiction, with this interesting article looking at the real Billy Kimber, an illegal bookmaker and gang leader birminghammail.co.uk-peaky-blinders 

Peaky Blinders

I had such high hopes for this series, which started tonight on BBC2

It did not disappoint.

One word review : Blindin'

Peaky Blinders BBC2 Thursdays 9pm (and even more stunning on BBC2 HD) Watch it!