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| Version 0 | Version 1 |
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| Peaky Blinders; The Wipers Times; Blackout; Top Boy – review | Peaky Blinders; The Wipers Times; Blackout; Top Boy – review |
| (3 days later) | |
| Peaky Blinders (BBC2) | iPlayer | Peaky Blinders (BBC2) | iPlayer |
| The Wipers Times (BBC2) | iPlayer | The Wipers Times (BBC2) | iPlayer |
| Blackout (C4) | 4oD | Blackout (C4) | 4oD |
| Top Boy (C4) | 4oD | Top Boy (C4) | 4oD |
| What a screed of tweed inhabited our screens last week, looms-full and truckles of it. Fortunately I love tweed: two suits, seven jackets and nine caps, both Harris and Donegal, and a dubious one produced in 1940s Bombay. None of them, I think – but I'll now and go check – possesses razor blades tucked roughly into the lapels or the cap-peaks. This is (only possibly) an advantage in 2013 Hove. In the 1919 Birmingham of Peaky Blinders this lack would have amounted to a blunder. This new six-part BBC crime drama, and Cillian Murphy, burst on to televisions on Thursday night with a big black horse and a street full of mud and blood and snotters, and is magnificent. It's as if Boardwalk Empire and, somehow, The Sting and bits of The Godfather (Part II, obviously) had been transblinked to Brum. | What a screed of tweed inhabited our screens last week, looms-full and truckles of it. Fortunately I love tweed: two suits, seven jackets and nine caps, both Harris and Donegal, and a dubious one produced in 1940s Bombay. None of them, I think – but I'll now and go check – possesses razor blades tucked roughly into the lapels or the cap-peaks. This is (only possibly) an advantage in 2013 Hove. In the 1919 Birmingham of Peaky Blinders this lack would have amounted to a blunder. This new six-part BBC crime drama, and Cillian Murphy, burst on to televisions on Thursday night with a big black horse and a street full of mud and blood and snotters, and is magnificent. It's as if Boardwalk Empire and, somehow, The Sting and bits of The Godfather (Part II, obviously) had been transblinked to Brum. |
| The ex-squaddies of the first world war had found themselves, as do most ex-squaddies, disenfranchised, but also burdened, squalid and horny. There have been similar films with echoes of the second world war, most notably Basil Dearden's wonderful The League of Gentleman (1960), but they were an altogether kinder affair. The peaky blinders of Brum had various new wars to fight and did so with a certain indiscrimination. | The ex-squaddies of the first world war had found themselves, as do most ex-squaddies, disenfranchised, but also burdened, squalid and horny. There have been similar films with echoes of the second world war, most notably Basil Dearden's wonderful The League of Gentleman (1960), but they were an altogether kinder affair. The peaky blinders of Brum had various new wars to fight and did so with a certain indiscrimination. |
| Directed by the frankly over-talented Otto Bathurst, it's a beautiful, engrossing and doomed story, shot with passion and style and rough humour, and much rain. Be warned: there are many mentions of the word I'll choose to transcribe as "fooking". Murphy is, as ever, a masterclass in both "boy-pretty" and "deeply talented", the two phrases normally mutually exclusive. But Sam Neill is a revelation. It's as if he hadn't spent the past 35 years as "revered Hollywood star", but rather the past 160 years in the Proddy bogs taking a masters in the lashing-up of petards of farm stump dynamite, so good is his accent. When he, as the Belfast copper brought in to sort out the cop corruption in Brum, makes his opening statement in the station, and after lengthy allusions to local onanists and paedophiles, starts on "Fenians and communists", you could just see the spittle of hatred flying. But he wore a fine tweed. As will this entire series. | Directed by the frankly over-talented Otto Bathurst, it's a beautiful, engrossing and doomed story, shot with passion and style and rough humour, and much rain. Be warned: there are many mentions of the word I'll choose to transcribe as "fooking". Murphy is, as ever, a masterclass in both "boy-pretty" and "deeply talented", the two phrases normally mutually exclusive. But Sam Neill is a revelation. It's as if he hadn't spent the past 35 years as "revered Hollywood star", but rather the past 160 years in the Proddy bogs taking a masters in the lashing-up of petards of farm stump dynamite, so good is his accent. When he, as the Belfast copper brought in to sort out the cop corruption in Brum, makes his opening statement in the station, and after lengthy allusions to local onanists and paedophiles, starts on "Fenians and communists", you could just see the spittle of hatred flying. But he wore a fine tweed. As will this entire series. |
| Scratchier cloth had been all that was on offer in the trenches a few years previously, in the thoroughly wise and wholly entertaining hour-and-a-half of The Wipers Times. Scripted by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman with a certain love, it told the true story of an underground press – literally – that existed beneath the trenches of Ypres and was employed to create a satirical, if roughly well-intentioned, newspaper. This programme was, as its subject had been, shot through with gallows humour – there were almost too many sharp lines to begin to record. But one sparks up: it's the interchange between Michael Palin (for it is he – my God, he doesn't age at all, by the way) and a pompous fellow officer, which has fierce pre-echoes of Good Morning, Vietnam. "The war is not funny, sir." Palin: "I rather think the authors are aware of that. I have a feeling that may be the point." | Scratchier cloth had been all that was on offer in the trenches a few years previously, in the thoroughly wise and wholly entertaining hour-and-a-half of The Wipers Times. Scripted by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman with a certain love, it told the true story of an underground press – literally – that existed beneath the trenches of Ypres and was employed to create a satirical, if roughly well-intentioned, newspaper. This programme was, as its subject had been, shot through with gallows humour – there were almost too many sharp lines to begin to record. But one sparks up: it's the interchange between Michael Palin (for it is he – my God, he doesn't age at all, by the way) and a pompous fellow officer, which has fierce pre-echoes of Good Morning, Vietnam. "The war is not funny, sir." Palin: "I rather think the authors are aware of that. I have a feeling that may be the point." |
| Touching and clever, and well done Mr Hiz for having unearthed two charming unsung heroes of that war. Three, possibly: one Sergeant Harris, in civvy life a printer, surely worked marvels in the darkened trenches, mastering not only the tiny type but doing so in reverse. And the lack of it – "There's a bit of a drawback," he says, "in that we're very short of 'y's and 'e's." Captain Fred Roberts, the masterful Ben Chaplin, simply mutters back: "Just as well we're not based anywhere called Ypres then." As dry and enlightening as the mud of Flanders wasn't. | Touching and clever, and well done Mr Hiz for having unearthed two charming unsung heroes of that war. Three, possibly: one Sergeant Harris, in civvy life a printer, surely worked marvels in the darkened trenches, mastering not only the tiny type but doing so in reverse. And the lack of it – "There's a bit of a drawback," he says, "in that we're very short of 'y's and 'e's." Captain Fred Roberts, the masterful Ben Chaplin, simply mutters back: "Just as well we're not based anywhere called Ypres then." As dry and enlightening as the mud of Flanders wasn't. |
| From tweed to the yukky, plasticised foam of puffa jackets. You couldn't quite escape them last week. First there was Channel 4's fictional documentary Blackout, which gave me shiverings. The premise was simple: the national grid had been wiped out by unspecified cyber-attack. Fine: cope with it. Learn to bake bread in rabbit holes and clean your teeth with ash twigs. Problem number one was: no one addicted to a smartphone could seemingly manage this or even close. "We couldn't even get a McDonald's for breakfast," wept someone gurny. "Someone's really cocked up… probably the government," said someone else I couldn't care about. "I'll be really pissed off if my fish dies because the government can't sort the power out," said another lame-brain. The blame game was frenzied. And videoed, constantly. | From tweed to the yukky, plasticised foam of puffa jackets. You couldn't quite escape them last week. First there was Channel 4's fictional documentary Blackout, which gave me shiverings. The premise was simple: the national grid had been wiped out by unspecified cyber-attack. Fine: cope with it. Learn to bake bread in rabbit holes and clean your teeth with ash twigs. Problem number one was: no one addicted to a smartphone could seemingly manage this or even close. "We couldn't even get a McDonald's for breakfast," wept someone gurny. "Someone's really cocked up… probably the government," said someone else I couldn't care about. "I'll be really pissed off if my fish dies because the government can't sort the power out," said another lame-brain. The blame game was frenzied. And videoed, constantly. |
| Problem number two, as you may have surmised, was that I couldn't have given a rat's arse for any of the wheedling, whiny scut-mongrels who littered my screen. There's a faint rule for dystopian, end-of-world flicks, and it is that you have to have someone to root for. Fine, the power was out (scary woo!). But doesn't dawn, um, dawn? I'd like to think there were, at a cool estimate, 50 million people just getting on with it. Depressingly silly. To the scut-mongrels I would sagely advise: grow a pair. | Problem number two, as you may have surmised, was that I couldn't have given a rat's arse for any of the wheedling, whiny scut-mongrels who littered my screen. There's a faint rule for dystopian, end-of-world flicks, and it is that you have to have someone to root for. Fine, the power was out (scary woo!). But doesn't dawn, um, dawn? I'd like to think there were, at a cool estimate, 50 million people just getting on with it. Depressingly silly. To the scut-mongrels I would sagely advise: grow a pair. |
| What did we learn from the four weeks of Top Boy? We learned, along the way, that black East End gangs share (if little else) this with Surrey golf clubs: they are able to announce friendship – cuz, bruv, bro, fam – and evoke the precise levels of insincerity with which a Pringle sweater would employ the term "my friend," or "old boy". The backstabbing in the latter would be figurative (most of the time); here, it was, most of the time, literal. Dushane came to an unbelievably trembly end. He's not dead, yet, quite. But he's given himself, and us, much to think about. About family, and politics, and betrayal, and whether we yet have any right to call ourselves civilised. This gloriously gloomy series, written by Ronan Bennett, had me sobbing with the occasional freely offered tendresse. But most often rending my tweed. | What did we learn from the four weeks of Top Boy? We learned, along the way, that black East End gangs share (if little else) this with Surrey golf clubs: they are able to announce friendship – cuz, bruv, bro, fam – and evoke the precise levels of insincerity with which a Pringle sweater would employ the term "my friend," or "old boy". The backstabbing in the latter would be figurative (most of the time); here, it was, most of the time, literal. Dushane came to an unbelievably trembly end. He's not dead, yet, quite. But he's given himself, and us, much to think about. About family, and politics, and betrayal, and whether we yet have any right to call ourselves civilised. This gloriously gloomy series, written by Ronan Bennett, had me sobbing with the occasional freely offered tendresse. But most often rending my tweed. |
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