Knight's knockout romp hits the spot

I'M ENJOYING A Thousand Blows, despite Disney's disturbing alert that it Contains Tobacco Depictions.

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The Singing Postman wouldn't have had a career these days. Hev yew gotta loight, boy? Lock him up! Dot Cotton too. ITVX recently slapped a content warning on Victoria Wood singing Let's Do It lest the thought of a woman asking her man to “slap me on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly” unsettled the feeble-minded. Oddly there's no warning that A Thousand Blows contains brutal boxing bouts and lusty gun-toting villainesses.

Two stories intertwine in Steven Knight's 19th-century romp.

Jamaican immigrant Hezekiah Moscow - a real historical figure - becomes a bare-knuckle boxer, and on the way, makes the acquaintance of “Queen” Mary Carr, amoral leader of an all-female gang of thieves called The Forty Elephants.

We first see Mary (Erin Doherty) faking childbirth in the street while her pals pick the pockets of gaping passers-by.

Stephen Graham plays Henry “Sugar” Goodson, the champion East End bare-knuckle boxer who cheats to survive.

Naturally, Hezekiah (Malachi Kirby) encounters fictionalised Victorian racism and has flashbacks of colonial cruelties the real Moscow might never have encountered. The content alert needed on most TV dramas is Warning: Woke Writer At Work.

In Unforgotten, murder victim Gerry Cooper was revealed to be a Brexit-voting, woman-beating, slum landlord. After his daughter stabbed him, his wife chopped up his body, dumped him in Whitney marshes and claimed the life insurance.