Steven Knight on A Thousand Blows: 'I aim to portray race authentically by capturing the colourless soul'

I’ve just asked the man who made 1920s Birmingham the coolest place on the planet if he can do it again with the Victorian East End of London, where his new Disney+ drama A Thousand Blows is set. He’s pretty sure he can.

“The show has absolutely all the ingredients for that,” Knight says. “A self-contained world with its own rules, fantastic performances; it looks great and it’s relevant to people’s lives.”

At 65, Knight has every reason to feel confident. The second series of his Second World War drama SAS Rogue Heroes was a runaway hit and a Peaky Blinders film is on the way. Even last year’s ska saga This Town, a project that was sniffed at by critics, was a success as far as he’s concerned.

“I love This Town,” he says. “And I don’t think you can let critics into your head. Asking myself ‘What do I think?’ is the only thing that should really matter.”

Fantastically imagined and occasionally very violent, A Thousand Blows is set in a crepuscular 1880s Victorian criminal underworld where newly arrived Jamaican immigrants Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) and Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall) find opportunity in the bloody business of bare-knuckle boxing.

Much of Knight’s work so far has been for the BBC – is it good to have the financial heft of a Disney-sized budget this time round?

“It’s a nice feeling. But the BBC have been around for long enough to know how to deal with the fact that they are not as wealthy as other people,” he says. “Sometimes, the fact you can’t blow up the car or destroy the bridge means you have to think of something else.”

That Disney money, however, has allowed Knight to conjure up an intoxicating and often brutal East End of cobbled streets, riverside alleys and teeming gin palaces in a disused brewery in Mortlake to the west of the capital.

“Disney created the most amazing London inside the brewery,” he says. “And it became our playground.” Were Disney executives crawling all over that playground, telling him what to do? “Not at all. This was a British way of doing stuff, and the creative process was left alone.”

And why would any executive mess with the process that came up with Peaky Blinders, one of the most successful TV dramas of recent history? Unlike that show’s main protagonist Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), Hezekiah Moscow and Alec Munroe were real people.

Likewise, bare-knuckle fighter Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham) and the woman he loves, Mary Carr (Erin Doherty), the head of the all-female criminal gang the Forty Elephants. “They actually existed,” says Knight. “They had a queen, Mary Carr, and went to Harrods where they’d steal so many things that they would waddle out looking like elephants. You wouldn’t dare make that up.”

Knight’s own origin story is remarkable enough. One of seven children, he was brought up in the rough-and-ready West Midlands of the 1960s and 1970s. “I was in proper fights when I was a kid. Where I was, there was a lot of it,” he says.

His father George, a blacksmith, fought when he was younger. “He was a good boxer. I remember his stories about fighting two twins on the same night and beating them. He used to wake us up when we were little kids to listen to Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay, live from Madison Square Garden. He bought us gloves and taught us all how to box.”

It was a childhood made possible by Knight’s mother Ida, a cleaner and factory worker who also tended to the family every day. No surprise, then, that in A Thousand Blows, as in Peaky Blinders, life is held together by the women.

“If you look at the world – and in my experience, most domestic situations – it’s the woman who’s in charge of common sense, and it’s the man who’s in charge of self-delusion. There’s an extra grown-upness to women that men don’t quite achieve, myself included.”

The social historian and broadcaster David Olusoga is involved with the show. Is that to give advice around the non-white characters? “David is brilliant, but he’s not there to prove a point or make a case. When I’m writing characters it’s not, here is someone of that race with everything they do as a consequence of the fact they’re of that race.

“I don’t think people are like that. I try to deal with the colourless soul of any human being. David is there to get down to the truth of how things were and how things are.”

And that matters, says Knight, because in looking back we get a better understanding of our lives today.

“If you pick a story that’s good, that’s rich, it will resonate with what’s happening now. Today people are trying to get into Britain on little boats, and A Thousand Blows is about somebody who comes aboard a ship and arrives in a sprawling city that has no mercy and no pity. Human beings don’t change. Love, jealousy, hatred, it’s always there.”

So there’s plenty more material to mine out there in the real world? “I’ve just started, really,” he says. “And it’s a great feeling.”

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A Thousand Blows comes to Disney Plus from 21st February. You can sign up to Disney Plus from £4.99 a month now.

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