It’s Peaky Blinders – but with boxing! Well, not quite: as we’ve discussed previously on these pages, Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows is actually much more than a copy-and-paste that sees the TV impresario swap flat caps for boxing gloves. There’s a touch of genius to the way Knight shoved disparate, real-life figures from Victorian London into the ring, rang the bell and watched the sparks fly.
In reality, it seems bare-knuckle boxer Henry ‘Sugar’ Goodson (a terrifying Stephen Graham) and Caribbean prizefighter Hezekiah Moscow (played with aching pathos by Malachi Kirby) did knock about together, but there’s no evidence that they knew feminist gangster Mary Carr (a wildly charismatic Erin Doherty). When they first came face-to-face in the lavish Disney show, Knight’s masterstroke proved so thrilling and inventive that it put the K-O on comparisons between Blows and Blinders.
Filmed at the same time as this one, the first season ended with Hezekiah’s career in ruins after he accidentally killed an American fighter in a high-class match. Mary, meanwhile, had lost the trust of her all-female criminal crew, the Forty Elephants, while Sugar was all washed up after a bloody dispute with his brother Treacle (James Nelson-Joyce, who plays a smaller role this time around). For season two, Knight and his cohorts give viewers 20 minutes’ grace to reacclimatise to the 1880s East End and catch up with its characters. After that, the punches rain down thick and fast.
Hezekiah, heartbroken by the assassination of his best pal Alec (Francis Lovehall), fishes a bearded, alcoholic Sugar from the street. Mary gradually regains the trust of the Forty Elephants and puts the band back together. And thus a new plan is hatched. With the help of American ‘mesmerist’ Sophie Lydons (a glassy Catherine McCormack), they’ll attempt an audacious art heist, lifting Caravaggio’s 16th century masterpiece Martha And Mary Magdalene from a befuddled collector and making themselves richer than God in the process.
As with any good boxing match, there are some adrenaline-pumping highs and wince-inducing lows to this latest series. The end of the second episode, which sees Hez and the gang barricade themselves inside Treacle’s pub The Blue Coat Boy, having been outnumbered by rival gang The Elephants Boys, is about as white-knuckle as TV drama gets. In the very next episode, however, the pace sags, with one set-piece descending into the kind of confusingly edited jousting you’d expect from any run-of-the-mill action movie.
Still, A Thousand Blows remains vastly superior to Knight’s most recent reinvention of the Peaky Blinders formula, House Of Guinness, which really did just replace flat caps with pints of the black stuff (and dubious Oirish accents). Partly that’s because you can only really get away with spinning off the cash cow once, but it’s also down to the brilliance of the characters he’s slung together in the best steampunk-styled Victorian boxing drama you’ll see this year.
In a crowded field, Mary is probably its most compelling figure – more so even than the seething Sugar – as Doherty plays her with a perfectly balanced mix of mettle, mischievousness and fleeting vulnerability. Yes, there’s a vague sense that the entire season is a warm-up for a long-teased plot development finally reached at the last bell. But when the ducking and diving is as frenetic as this, it’s well worth a flutter.
‘A Thousand Blows’ is streaming on Disney+ now