A Thousand Blows, review: Peaky Blinders' Steven Knight's brutal new drama may be his best yet
It used to be thought that viewers tuned into period drama just to look at it. Wasn't life wonderful in the 19th century? What better way to spend a Sunday night than revelling in the vistas and the dances and the Palladian facades?
Steven Knight 's period dramas, however, have proved that viewers don't care so much about the look of a time and place as they do about the energy. Shows like Peaky Blinders and SAS Rogue Heroes may take place in the past but they are alive now, pummelling you with personalities and plot. At their best they are roller coaster-ride unstoppable: just as you start to ask whether this kind of thing really happened in this place all those years ago, you're swept away in a whirlwind of character and capers. At a time when a superfluity of choice means the worst thing television can be is dull, Knight's dramas never are (which is probably why he is asked to write so many of them.)
A Thousand Blows, his new series for Disney+ 'inspired by true life stories', may be his best yet. It brings to life a late 19th-century East London that positively crackles with nefarious possibility. Into this maelstrom it hurls Mary Carr (Erin Doherty) and her 40 Elephants gang, a group of female pickpockets with eyes on bigger things. It then adds Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) and Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall), best friends from Jamaica who are fresh off the boat. They soon find themselves thrust into the criminal underbelly of London's thriving bare-knuckle boxing scene.
Put Hezekiah in cahoots with 'Queen'' Mary, and set them both up against Stephen Graham 's Sugar Goodson, the self-styled alpha of the East End fight game, and you have precisely the kind of period tinderbox into which Knight loves to throw a match.
What follows is brutal, and while A Thousand Blows deserves its five stars, viewers should be aware that it hails from the Raging Bull school of blood and sputum. It is a telling tale from the streaming age that this amount of stark violence should have found a home on a channel with Walt Disney's name on the masthead, but that's for another time...
But if you can get past the sickening blows in their thousands (and we can't say we weren't warned) then this is blockbuster television. Knight is not normally one for subtlety, but here even the plot about the Jamaican immigrants fuelled by loathing of their red-coated colonial oppressors is deftly handled. The historian David Olusoga is listed as an executive producer and anyone who has read his excellent Black and British – A Forgotten History will sense his guiding hand.
History and issues, however, are grace notes compared to the chorus of wonderful characters, and it's with its roster of ne'er do wells that A Thousand Blows hits the jackpot. Peaky Blinders propelled Cillian Murphy to the Hollywood A-List and a Best Actor Oscar. A Thousand Blows might just do the same for Erin Doherty. Her Mary Carr is a cockney Boudicca with a killer stare, an instant feminist icon (who would probably laugh hard and then shoot you if you told her that). She steals whatever she wants, including the show and probably next year's Bafta statuette. It is a sensational performance in a captivating, lawless stampede of a TV show.
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