I wanted to detonate a bit of an explosion

LYNN RUSK CHATS WITH ERIN DOHERTY, MALACHI KIRBY AND CREATOR STEVEN KNIGHT ABOUT SERIES TWO OF A THOUSAND BLOWS, SET IN THE BRUTAL EAST END OF LONDON

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WHEN Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight began work on his period drama about bare-knuckle boxing in Victorian Britain, he knew he wanted to make a second series.

So when Disney commissioned A Thousand Blows and took a leap of faith by renewing it for a second series before the first had even been released, Steven was thrilled.

Thankfully, that confidence paid off. Inspired by the true-life stories of characters battling for survival in the brutal East End of London in the 1880s, the series was a hit.

It stars This Is England actor Stephen Graham as notorious boxer Sugar Goodson, Small Axe star Malachi Kirby as Jamaican fighter Hezekiah Moscow and The Crown’s Erin Doherty as Mary Carr, the queen of an all-female criminal gang known as the Forty Elephants.

Season two picks up a year after the events of the first, with Hezekiah a shadow of the man he once was, while Sugar is estranged from his family and drinking himself to death.

But then Mary bursts back into town with her loyal second, Alice Diamond, played by Judy actress Darci Shaw, to reassemble her gang and reclaim her crown.

Steven, 66, says he wanted to pull the characters apart this season before bringing them back together.

“Where you start is so important,” explains the Birmingham-born writer. “In season one, we began with the arrival of someone who was a fish out of water in London and their experiences.

“By the end of the series, hopefully those characters are in people’s hearts and audiences are invested in where they're going.”