"I first put a treatment together in the 90s to Channel 4, and thank god it didn’t happen," Graham revealed.

"In those days there wasn’t the technology to do it justice. No CGI."

Decades later that he landed a commission from the BBC, who essentially gave him free rein to conceptualise Peaky Blinders and it finally aired on BBC Two in Septemeber 2013.

"They were so free and open with it. I wrote two episodes and they commissioned it. In the mysterious way of scripts, the scripts got out there, and we started getting calls from actors. Cillian Murphy made contact and it snowballed from there."