You may have thought that flat caps were as dead as cobbled streets and mass whippet-keeping, but don't be too sure. The BBC is going to unload six hours of them on to us all next year via its big-budget TV drama Peaky Blinders.
This excellent name comes from a gang of thugs in Birmingham and the story is centred on the capital of the Midlands in the dangerous confusion which followed the end of the First World War. As the BBC publicity says, we are in for 'Gangs, Guns, Communists, Returning Soldiers and Revolutionaries….' The thing which binds them together is flat caps.
The 'peaky blinder' tag makes this essential to the plot because, as the producers say, the name comes from the gangs' "practice of sewing razor blades into the peaks of their caps" to enforce their protection rackets and the like. Interestingly, the Birmingham Mail has a different explanation to do with a peculiar hair style (there is nothing new about Jedward), and it also places the original Blinders firmly in the late 19th century.
The sturdy vicar of St Jude's in Tonk Street set up a mission to win them over from the dark side and had largely succeeded before the First World War began.
Such freedom with chronology is no great deal in art, and especially when you hark to the joyful whoops of Screen Yorkshire. The series is their first investment of money from the new Yorkshire Content Fund which is using £7.5 million from the EU's European Regional Development Fund to promote film, games and digital enterprises in the county.
Hence we are getting eight weeks of Peaky Blinders filming here in the broad acres this autumn, to add to our own, home-grown gangsters (Red Riding), strippers (The Full Monty and The Calendar Girls) and other alluring cinema types.
Sally Joynson, Screen Yorkshire's chief executive says:
This is the type of production we are looking to attract to Yorkshire - big budget, epic storyline and with immense talent involved across the project. Peaky Blinders shows how our new fund is attracting productions of scale to the region.
Will Headingley stand in for Edgbaston and Leeds town hall for its Brummie equivalent? We shall see. No doubt Birmingham is going to have some of the pie, but this seizure by Yorkshire of other people's cultures can only be welcome. That's what the Northerner thinks.
