CAN YOU READ? CAN YOU WRITE? CAN YOU FIGHT?

How a Belfast cop helped Birmingham get grip on gangs terrorising the city

- BY KAREN ROCKETT

A GRIPPING tale of post-WWI Birmingham gangsters which became one of TV's most critically acclaimed historical crime dramas, Peaky Blinders shone a light on street violence, racketeering and the rise of organised crime in Britain.

Viewers couldn't get enough of Tommy Shelby, played by Irish star Cillian Murphy, and his dangerous criminal family in a production marked by super-stylish cinematography and charismatic performances - bringing to life a period of English history rarely explored on television.

And despite ending its TV run with a sixth and final series in 2022, creator Steven Knight isn't finished with the infamous street gang yet.

A Peaky Blinders movie, The Immortal Man, is due for release "soon" on Netflix (although an exact date has yet to be announced) - proving our fascination with no-good gangsters remains undiminished.

But how much of what we know from the drama is true of the real Peaky Blinders? A new documentary on Sky History tonight delves into the brutal truth behind the glamourised fiction.

The episode, part of a four-part series called Original Gangsters, presented by Game Of Thrones star Sean Bean, explores the Birmingham gangs who terrorised the city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Starting in the labyrinthine alleyways of the industrial Midlands city in the 1860s, where ruffians battled with police, it goes on to examine the rogue street mobs who became more organised and united under one man: Billy Kimber, one of the inspirations for Cillian Murphy's Thomas Shelby.

"It was a very violent time and we can see that from lots of court evidence and police records," says one of the documentary's key contributors, Corinne Brazier, the heritage manager at the West Midlands Police Museum and an expert on UK policing in the Midlands between the late 1800s and early 1900s.