Last Sunday night, almost four million people tuned in to witness Cillian Murphy signing off as Tommy Shelby – for now, at least.
The finale of Peaky Blinders, which had spent much of the season hinting that it might do away with our antihero for good, instead opted to keep matters open, with a masterful twist that might as well have been an apology for all of the meandering routes it took to get there. (I can’t have been the only one wondering why the gangster-turned-MP, who remained handy with a firearm and loose with the law, still appeared to have more scruples and ethics than most of the bunch currently in charge of the country.) The final episode was a deserved reward for those of us who stuck with the show, during what I found to be a confusing last season.
I spent much of it trying to work out why Tommy was in bed with Oswald Mosley, figuratively, and with Diana Mitford, literally, and how the IRA factored into fascism and what that had to do with the opium trade in Boston.
About halfway through, I found the best approach was to avoid actively attempting to make sense of it and instead let the spectacle carry me to the end. Without that last episode, I suspect I would have felt a bit cheated, but with it, it felt like a fair deal.
Another series that increasingly seems as if it is driven by spectacle over sense is Killing Eve, also in its final stages, which will soon attempt to wrap it all up in a neat bow. Good luck with that.
Like Peaky Blinders, I have stuck with it and each episode is pleasurable: it looks good, travels the world, has a sense of humour and a brilliant cast. But I have long since given up on trying to fathom what, exactly, the point of it is, especially when it comes to The 12, the mysterious group at the centre of the plot. Who is in The 12, who is out of The 12, who wants them dead and why? Does it matter? We may found out. It is just as likely that we won’t.
I am willing to accept that, as I was often warned it would, too much television has turned my brain to mush. Then again, I have also been catching up on last year’s Station Eleven, which has a tricky structure and premise, and its complexities have been handled deftly, to magical effect. I have nothing against surface charm, but I was pleased to find a series that pushes beyond it.
Natasha Lyonne: a lack of false modesty is the sign of a real pro
Last week’s edition of the New Yorker included a rambunctious profile of the actor Natasha Lyonne, whose career has been long, varied and always intriguing. Lyonne was promoting the new season of her series Russian Doll, a thought experiment disguised as a timeloop comedy, though she talked a good talk about everything from quantum physics to inherited trauma.
One of my favourite parts came when the writer of the piece notes seeing two of Lyonne’s acting awards, for her comeback stint in Orange Is the New Black, on her piano in her New York apartment. “You always read about people who say, ‘I put my awards directly in the garbage, because I’m grounded’. No! Put your awards where people can see them!” said Lyonne, describing those who take the more low-key approach as “schmucks”. I am all for an end to faux-humility, and women celebrating themselves for a job well done. I read a lot about the great EastEnders star June Brown last week, who died at 95, and many of the stories came with a sense of, “they don’t make them like they used to”. But for a moment, reading that profile of Lyonne, I thought that perhaps they still do.
Anne McIntosh: cyclists are not the menace she thinks they are
The Conservative politician Baroness McIntosh of Pickering has called for a ban on cyclists using mobile phones after a close encounter near the Houses of Parliament, in which a cyclist came towards her, “one hand bicycling, one hand on the mobile phone, on the wrong side of the road”.
Motorists, of course, are banned from using phones while driving, but cyclists would face less specific prosecution for careless or dangerous cycling. The former minister wondered why the Department for Transport had not addressed the issue of using a phone while cycling. It sounds as if the wrong side of the road part was also a problem, though the rules dictating where to cycle are fairly clear.
There are few words more inflammatory in the UK than “cyclists”, so I approach this with caution. But as a cyclist and a driver, I feel qualified to argue with myself about who is entitled to what space and whether the “road tax” exists. Phone usage while driving is an enormous problem and anyone who drives on a motorway regularly will notice that the tougher penalties that came in last month have done little to dissuade drivers from checking their phone while driving at 70mph.
Cyclists do, on occasion, cause accidents through careless cycling, although travelling at a lower speed and weighing far less than a car means such accidents are not usually as catastrophic. It seems a bit premature to start to shift our attention to cyclists when there is still a wide perception that it’s normal to send a text from the fast lane.
• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
