Here’s your chance to discover the real Birmingham Peaky Blinders

The new series of Peaky Blinders is finally back on our television screens.

The second episode of the sixth and final series aired last night, and now a documentary looking at the real-life gangsters who inspired the show is set to air on BBC2 this evening (March 7).

The two-part hour long documentaries, named the Real Peaky Blinders, will look at the ‘tribal warfare that characterised Victorian Birmingham in the late 1800s’.

The Real Peaky Blinders looks at some of the real historical details that inspired the television series, sorting the fact from the fiction and joining the dots between them.

The first episode explores the Peaky Blinders phenomenon in Birmingham, starting with their first mention in the press in the 1890s and tracing that backwards to their origins in the “slogging gangs” of the 1860s.

It’s set to focus on some of the real people who appear in the show – like Billy Kimber, Darby Sabini and Alfie Solomon – as well as the Sheldon crime family, who Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight was both related to and inspired by.

The second episode, which will air next Monday (14 March) meanwhile, will chart the history of the Peaky Blinders as an organised gang – from their rise to prominence in the 1890s to their eventual downfall across the 1910s.

Who is in the show?

The show has been created by Steven Knight, who was inspired by a number of stories about real Birmingham gangs, which were first relayed to him as family legend, and he has even revealed that his dad’s uncle was part of the real Peaky Blinders gang.

The series is presented by Brimingham historian Professor Carl Chinn. An expert in Birmingham history, Chinn already knows a great deal about the real-life gangs that inspired Peaky Blinders.

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