This story of Birmingham gangsters avoided the curse of the second series with new characters, torrid family melodrama and a sense of its own greatness

As the makers of Homeland, The Fall, The Americans and Utopia discovered, getting a second run can be a poisoned chalice. All of the above struggled to regain their narrative footing in series two, despite a prevailing critical and commercial wind. Peaky Blinders utterly bucked that trend this year, with panache, cheek and chutzpah to spare, making a further mockery of Bafta’s baffling snub for series one, comically referenced by star Sam Neill on awards night in May (“I’m actually crying inside underneath this bluff exterior”).

Steven Knight’s grandiose mythologisation of the post-first world war gangster class in Birmingham ran on BBC2 for six larger-than-life episodes in the autumn term of 2013. To quote Spinal Tap’s manager, its audience became more selective, dropping from 3m to 2.2m as some viewers fled its anachronistic alt-rock soundtrack, quasi-sectarian complexities and bendy Brummie accents. But common sense vanquished maths and channel controller Janice Hadlow, recognising a prestige product, ordered up another six. (The show has subsequently been bought and streamed by Netflix, as if to prove its international potential.)

Comparisons to HBO’s New Jersey-set Boardwalk Empire – ambitious portrayal of violent between-the-wars shenanigans in hats – bounce off Knight, who vehemently claims never to have seen it, but they hold water for those of us who admire the gangster lean and civic corruption of both. Peaky Blinders boasts a more easily marketed sex symbol than Boardwalk’s kinda-funny-lookin’ Steve Buscemi, with Cillian Murphy playing icy cool boss Tommy Shelby as the brutally calculating sociopath it’s OK to swoon over.

With his horse-fixing gang having won a turf war against Neill’s repressed Royal Irish Constabulary chief over a stolen cache of IRA arms, the saga resumes two years later, with Tommy (“a man of some capabilities”) pushing for new gambling territory in London, failing to heed the warning of his Romany sister-in-law Esme (full-bloodedly played by Detectorists’ Aimee-Ffion Edwards): “London is smoke and trouble, Thomas.”

I was lucky enough to see the first episode on a vast multiplex screen at its red-carpet Birmingham premiere, where I hosted a Q&A before a home crowd, and the local pride was palpable. This was literally event television in a city too often ignored by fiction. The dark, Satanic milieu of series one was maintained by two brilliant directors, Tom Harper and Otto Bathurst, but the entirety of series two was gifted to Colm McCarthy from Ripper Street and Sherlock, who raised the stylistic bar. McCarthy exquisitely choreographed a pram-delivered pub bombing in the opening moments to the theme tune Red Right Hand by Nick Cave (in which we learn of a “tall handsome man in a dusty black coat … You’ll see him in your head, on the TV screen”). Arctic Monkeys and PJ Harvey joined Cave on the cue-sheet to historical accuracy-baiting effect.

Though Murphy commands attention whenever he’s on-screen, he shared the spotlight this series with striking new characters, not least Tom Hardy’s darkly comic Jewish bootlegger and Finn Cole’s white sheep, who may yet turn out to be the Shelbys’ Michael Corleone. (Intelligent, resourceful production designer Grant Montgomery has confessed to a Godfather influence, even placing oranges in Tommy’s office – the citrus symbol of doom in Coppola’s classic.)

Cinematic visuals, thumping music, torrid family melodrama and ripe dialogue (“I couldn’t trust the hearts and livers of the English pansies and posies they’ve given me as operatives,” spits Neill), Peaky Blinders forges new territory for British TV drama, and it passes the second series test because its visionary creator has a masterplan that stretches over multiple future seasons. I hope we get to see them all.

