A hard knock life

Steven Knight's brutal new illegal boxing drama is set in the underside of Victorian Britain. Its stars take ringside seats to tell us about filming the TV series

- Andy Welch

Stephen Graham is red-faced and fidgeting in a London hotel alongside Malachi Kirby and Erin Doherty, his co-stars in A Thousand Blows. I explained how my partner had initially dismissed the gritty period drama on account of all the brutal boxing bouts. But after seeing a glimpse of an extremely hench, shirtless and sweating Graham, she decided that she probably would be able to join me in watching after all.

"I don't know what to say," says Graham, as Kirby and Doherty tease him. "If that's what it takes to get bums on seats, I'll go with it." The physical transformations - Kirby says he lost his "lockdown belly" and he looks like a mean, lean fighting machine in the show - took them about six months, training five days a week and eating a diet of chicken, rice and broccoli.

"It's now part of my life," Graham says.

Graham stars as Sugar Goodson, an undefeated champion in the world of illegal boxing in Victorian-era London. Sugar's dominance is threatened by the arrival of Hezekiah Moscow (Kirby) and Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall), friends from Jamaica, seeking a better life in Britain. Hezekiah, younger and fitter than Sugar, is also more than his match in the ring, which sends Sugar into a jealous rage.

Doherty, 32, meanwhile, plays Mary Carr, the pistol-and knife-wielding leader of the all-female gang of thieves the Forty Elephants. Best known for playing Princess Anne in The Crown, Doherty sees the gang as akin to the suffragettes. Like their more famous sisters, the Elephants are also seeking emancipation-but using different methods.

The series was created by Steven Knight, the man behind Peaky Blinders and SAS: Rogue Heroes. Like those shows, A Thousand Blows is loosely based on reality. Goodson, Moscow and Carr were all real people, while the shoplifting gang operated in London's Elephant and Castle area from the 1870s onwards.