By Order Of:Peaky Blinders S1.

"You have to be as bad as them in order to survive" - Polly Shelby.

I'm late to the game - again. Very late. The first series of Peaky Blinders (BBC2/iPlayer) aired in September and October 2013 - nearly nine years ago - and I didn't watch it at the time because I didn't have a working television. By the time I got one I was left behind and didn't think it'd be worth catching up on but, as I found with Line of Duty, sometimes delving back into the history of these programmes and binge watching them can be rewarding.

As all six series of Peaky Blinders are now available on iPlayer, I thought I'd do just that but, to be honest - and unlike Line of Duty, Peaky Blinders didn't hook me from the off. It took me a couple of episodes to get into it and it took me maybe two more before I started to feel emotionally involved (sometimes it's hard to take the side of, or idolise, violent psychopaths - and Peaky Blinders is full of them). By the end, though not as emotionally caught up in it as I have been with many other things, I was all set to go in again for the next five series.

I had the feeling that the first series had involved a lot of scene setting and character building that will be paid off down the line. That's not to say it lacked narrative or action. In a very rainy and very grey (there's no actual daylight, let alone sunshine, at all for the first hour long episode) in Small Heath, Birmingham 1919 where almost everybody smokes, drinks, and fights, Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) runs a criminal gang called the Peaky Blinders who are looking to move into book-keeping.

Looking into going straight, well - straighter, but, of course, it's not that easy. When crime and violence has been the family business for so long, when you rule by fear rather than respect, it's hard to suddenly change that. Not everybody lets you. We're not even sure how serious Tommy is when he talks about it. Or if it's just convenient for him to say that to keep power in his family.

Because it's the Shelby family where most of the power struggles are, and a great deal of the drama is, played out. Tommy's a war hero, with medals for gallantry in the Somme, and he's doing well looking after the family. Aunt Polly (Helen McCrory) is both impressed with the way Tommy has taken over the family 'firm' and scared that Tommy may either over reach or, worse still, commit acts of such horrific violence that even a family of hardened criminals consider them too much.

Tommy's older brother, Arthur Jr (Paul Anderson), dressed like a Billy Childish style hipster, feels emasculated by Tommy's rise and has turned to the drink and younger brother Johnny (Joe Cole) has four kids to look after and has fallen for the local whore Lizzie Stark (Natasha O'Keeffe) which gives the series one of it's funniest lines, after Johnny describes his intentions to marry Lizzie as brave.

Polly retorts with "brave is going where no man's gone before and with Lizzie Stark, John, that is really not what you'll be doing". The Shelbys, at least, come together when faced with enemies or problems. Or most of them do. When long estranged father, Arthur Sr (Tommy Flanagan), returns he fights with his sons, steals from them, and then disappears as quickly as he reappeared.

He's a wrong 'un, for sure, and his brief appearance explains some of the behaviour of the Shelby brothers. Although, of course, there are plentiful suggestions that the things they've seen, and the things they've done, in the war have brutalised them too. There is a lot of PTSD in Peaky Blinders.

It's not just the war that have made violent men of the Shelbys. It's England too. Descended from Irish Romani stock, the Shelbys are from a marginal, and demonised, part of society (one of the most emotional scenes in the whole first series is when Polly opens up about the family history and what happened to her own two children). 

They've been treated like shit all their life so it's understandable they should want to be respected. Less so they should resort to such hideous violence to get it. Closest to home, Tommy's former school friend, and now foe, Freddie Thorne (Iddo Goldberg) has become a problem to the Shelbys. A Communist agitator who attracts unwanted police attention to Small Heath and, worse, has become romantically involved with, and has impregnated, Tommy's sister Ada (Sophie Rundle).

Giving Peaky Blinders something of a Romeo and Juliet dimension to go with the oft mentioned biblical parallels - Hades and Styx (not the Chicago soft rock band) both get a mention. Outside the family, the Shelbys are up against local Chinese and Italian gangsters, the violent Lee family, and, most dangerously of all, a team of Irish police who have been sent from Belfast to Birmingham (by Winston Churchill - played by Andy Nyman) to clean up the city.

They're headed by the supposedly puritan Chief Inspector Chester Campbell (Sam Neill). Campbell is anti-gangster, anti-Fenian, and deeply anti-Communist and rants passionately about his beliefs, you could at times mistake him for the firebrand former DUP leader Ian Paisley, but we soon learn that his motivations are clouded by his desires, his work hobbled by his biases, and his puritan ethic sullied by his own transgressions as well as his willingness to cut a deal with pretty much anyone if it serves his purpose.

He gains even less respect than the Shelbys who, when not clashing heads with Campbell, are busy trying to either get in on Billy Kimber's (Charlie Creed-Miles) book keeping racket or take it over completely. The fact that the Peaky Blinders have (a) got most of the police in their pocket and (b) have come into a large consignment of guns - a priority interest for Campbell - suggests the future, though loaded with potential violence and death, looks brighter than the ever grey present for the Shelby clan.

That's not a spoiler. Six full series of programmes is. We know Tommy's not going to die because his face is used to advertise all future series. But we know to fill those series him, and his family, are going to have to undergo all manner of scrapes and, probably, losses. 

In this world of horses, flat caps, pub brawls, heavy industry, lawlessness, and prostitution - where state sanctioned hanging is still legal - we can only sit back and wonder who will cross who next, who will collaborate with who next, and who will be violently dismissed next.

It's quite a ride and the writer Steven Knight (with assistance from Toby Finlay and Stephen Russell) and directors Otto Bathurst and Tom Harper don't shy away from showing us the uglier side of life on the wrong side of the tracks/law. 

People are beaten to death, horses are shot, grenades are left in cars, claw hammers and other potential instruments of torture are regularly wielded, ,and razor blades are employed in services unrelated to shaving. It is, of course, something of a man's world.

Little surprise, then, that Ada, unlike Polly, should wish to remove herself from it. But what of Irish barmaid Grace (Annabelle Wallis)? We know she likes to sing but as she cosies up to Tommy, we also see her holding secret meetings with Campbell. What's her agenda? And are personal feelings starting to change that agenda?

The soundtrack of Nick Cave (Red Right Hand, of course, is the show's theme), The White Stripes, Tom Waits, and Dan Auerbach is hardly the sort of stuff that pubs like The Garrison, the pub Tommy has taken over - with threats of violence naturally, would have blared out in that era but the country death blues feel seems to sit weirdly well with the grimy industrial hellscape of the West Midlands one hundred years ago.

Alongside the fact that everyone gives a great performance (shout outs, too, to Benjamin Zephaniah as street preacher/gang member Jeremiah 'Jimmy' Jesus, Samuel Edward-Cook as troubled ex-soldier Danny Whizz-Bang, and David Dawson as Billy Kimber's sober voice of reason Roberts), you can learn a few history lessons about the IRA, the Romani language, Russian influence over the Communists of Britain at the time, and BSA.

A company I knew made motorbikes but not one I was aware had originally begun life as the Birmingham Small Arms company in 1861. Of course you don't have to sign up for the history lesson. You can just sit back and vicariously enjoy the rollercoaster ride that so often comes with (depicting) the criminal lifestyle. 

I did both - and enjoyed it all the more so for that. But I rather suspect, and hope, that as I get into the next few series' of Peaky Blinders the emotional impact will be as powerful as the drama. Tommy Shelby says, towards the end of this series, that the past is not his concern and nor is the future. For me, the future of this series is now my concern - even if it was shown in the past.