Some will come for the boxing. The Peaky Blinders creator, Steven Knight, has set his latest endeavour in the East End of London and the shadowy underworld of late‑Victorian bare-knuckle fighting. The new series is called A Thousand Blows, and this is an understatement. Some will stay away because of the boxing. This would be a mistake, because it is about so much more. It is about all kinds of violence – that perpetrated against children by those supposed to protect them, against the increasingly poor by the increasingly rich, against women by men, against the colonised by colonisers – and what happens when you throw people together in the melting pot of a rapidly industrialising city where only the fittest can survive.
There is a lot going on – narratively, thematically and cartilage crunchingly – in Knight’s historically based (but freely tweaked) saga. The man knows what he is doing, though, and the experience is one of energetic abundance rather than chaos. If you are left wishing there had been more time to get to know some of the marginal characters – well, what a rare sensation that is, compared with wishing you weren’t watching padded ciphers drifting round a barren plot. The conclusion leaves us set fair for a second series, so those tantalisingly peripheral people may yet get a chance to move centre-stage.
For now, however, we have a mighty triumvirate bestriding a teeming world of desperate transactions, treacheries and occasional enduring, unbreakable loyalties. The headline act, within and without the show, is Stephen Graham, beefed up and terrifying as Henry “Sugar” Goodson, the owner of the local pub. He is Wapping’s bare-knuckle champion (“My heart cannot be trusted and there are devils who pull the carriages I ride”) and has spent years seeing off allcomers in the bloodied ring behind the bar. It is Graham’s great gift, demonstrated already in so much of his previous work, to let us glimpse the terror that dwells within those who make it their business to terrorise.
Then there is Mary Carr (Erin Doherty in a truly mesmerising performance), the leader of a troop of female thieves and pickpockets known as the Forty Elephants – based on a real-life gang – trained by her mother and by life to rely on no one but herself. “The city makes only one promise – that it will kill you the first chance it gets.” She knows Sugar from their shared workhouse days and is as brutal and terrifying in her own way as he is in his – although she will also break a man’s fingers if it means it will stop him being killed in a fight. Kindness takes many forms in a Knight drama.
Mary realises that the only way to escape the slums is through more audacious means than stealing purses, or smash-and-grab raids at Harrods’ jewellery counters (immense fun though they are to watch). She is planning a heist, in which she and the gang will relieve visiting dignitaries of gifts they have been given – by the queen, no less – as they return from the palace. It is touches like this, along with lyrical turns of phrase as audacious as any heist, that give A Thousand Blows an irresistible, Dickensian-yarn quality that helps smuggle in timely social and political commentary, much as the great man did himself.
Finally, there is Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby), who is just as brilliant as his co-stars and responsible for much of the show’s comedy and tenderness. Hezekiah is a starry-eyed new arrival in London, along with his slightly more anxious friend Alec (Francis Lovehall). He has come from Jamaica after a man promised to give him a job as a lion tamer (a story apparently also drawn from life) and in the wake of experiences – that unfold for us in flashback – of his village and people falling to the redcoats. The job that is actually on offer proves to be a dreadful one. So, in search of alternative income, the pair are drawn into the boxing world and, encouraged by Mary, towards the murky opportunities that surround it. When Hezekiah effectively beats Sugar in a fight, his prospects change for the worse – and for the better.
Hezekiah and Mary’s mutual attraction further complicates matters, but all three characters are bound by their driving ambition, their hunger for something more that is just out of reach and protected by their betters. Rich men in their gardens, poor men at their gates – and women and immigrants behind them, preparing to smash the lot to smithereens.
• A Thousand Blows is on Disney+
