A Thousand Blows, Disney+ review - Peaky Blinders comes to Ripper Street?

Steven Knight is beginning to resemble the British version of Taylor Sheridan. While Sheridan has been saturating our screens with Yellowstone, 1923, Landman etc, Knight has been reeling off Peaky Blinders, SAS Rogue Heroes and even the story of opera star Maria Callas.

With A Thousand Blows, Knight has travelled back to Victorian London in the 1880s, the era of Jack the Ripper, for a lurid exploration of the city’s foul-smelling underworld of crime, corruption and illegal boxing rackets. His chief protagonists are boxer Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham, pictured below, making a deft switch from Scouse to Cockney), a pair of Jamaican lads hoping to find their fortune in the hub of the British Empire, and the East End’s Queen of Crime Mary Carr (Erin Doherty, pictured bottom), who runs an all-female gang of blaggers called the Forty Elephants (their real-life forebears apparently operated around Elephant & Castle).

It’s Carr’s crew who are the first to step into the limelight, kicking off episode one with a brazen scam involving a fake pregnant woman whose waters burst dramatically on a busy pavement. As concerned, and possibly aghast, bystanders gather round, little do they realise they’re being conned by a prosthetic pregnancy and have been gathered together to have their prize possessions pick-pocketed. Nice one ladies, if in rather dubious taste.

It’s a quasi-Dickensian milieu of lurid, almost cartoon-like characters enmeshed in all manner of personal and professional chicanery, with Daniel Mays having great larks as mutton-chopped publican and boxing entrepreneur William "Punch" Lewis. You need to take care that he doesn’t serve you surgical spirit instead of Jamaican rum.

There’s a “long arc” theme about an imminent visit to London by an Imperial Chinese delegation who have an appointment to visit the Queen, which has got Ms Carr salivating about its potential for grand-scale criminal activity (ironically, Erin Doherty played Princess Anne in The Crown). Meanwhile, the Elephants continue to turn a dishonest penny by such outrages as staging a mass onslaught on Harrods, invading the premises and coolly helping themselves to everything in sight while the staff faff about in panic.

Back in the illegal bare-knuckle boxing ring, Sugar Goodson is giving all-comers a horrific battering (and if fists won’t do it, elbows and head-butts can be pressed into service), until the fateful day when he finds himself squaring up to Jamaica’s Hezekiah Moscow. Hezza has come to London apparently intending to become a lion-timer, but his real gifts prove to be his speed, strength and height in the ring. He loses the first bout, but only thanks to having the legs pulled from under him by a dodgy punter. Sugar realises – or at least is made to realise by his brother and manager Treacle – that he’s not getting any younger. And there’s always someone faster.

The fight theme will migrate into the slightly classier milieu of the legalised boxing clubs up in the West End, where toffs like the Earl of Lonsdale hold sway, and where they’ve achieved such heights of sophistication that the boxers even wear boxing gloves. The mix of the swells and the low-lifes will prove reliably combustible, though the problem with the show is it’s difficult to feel much real sympathy with any of the characters. Everybody’s too outsized and brightly coloured to have much of a plausible inner life, and all the swearing, fighting, cheating and boozing leaves you feeling numb after a while.

Knight uses the Jamaican characters (Hezekiah’s buddy is Alec, played by Francis Lovehall) to shoehorn in some flashback scenes of the brutish behaviour of the British Army in the Caribbean, so you’re never too far from a lecture about colonialism and racism. However, this stuff makes a clumsy fit with the exaggerated characters and lurid plotting.

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