Cameras roll in Craven as new TV drama Peaky Blinders is filmed (From Craven Herald)

Cameras roll in Craven as new TV drama Peaky Blinders is filmed

8:00am Sunday 14th October 2012 in News

A new six-part multi-million pound drama commissioned by BBC2 has started filming in Yorkshire – and one of the locations is Bolton Abbey.

Peaky Blinders is an epic gangster family saga set in England after the First World War and its stars include Sam Neill, Helen McGrory, Cillian Murphy and Charlie Creed-Miles.

The film is part of a series of projects funded by regional film agency Screen Yorkshire from its £7.5 million European Regional Development Fund.

Screen Yorkshire’s head of communications, Andrew Craske, said: “Although the story is set in Birmingham, films go where the money is and Screen Yorkshire offered a multi-million- pound package of investment. We’re hoping this will be bigger than David Peace’s Red Riding, which was three films. This is a six-part series with a big international cast, big budget and high production values.”

Sally Joynson, chief executive of Screen Yorkshire, said: “Peaky Blinders is the first project to receive investment from the Yorkshire Content Fund and what a project it is.

“It 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.”

The story begins in 1919 in the slum neighbourhoods of post-war Birmingham. Returning soldiers, newly-minted revolutionaries and criminal gangs all fight for survival in an industrial landscape gripped by economic upheaval.

Guns smuggled home from the trenches find their way onto the streets and become lethal currency. Communists don't just dream of revolution – they are planning for it and the Government is expecting it.

As Churchill mobilises his Special Branch forces, illegal bookmakers make fortunes in speak-easy betting shops and traumatised infantrymen drink away their shell-shock in riotous ale houses.

At the top of this industrial jungle are the Shelby family, whose many brothers and sisters, cousins and uncles, make up the fiercest gang of all, the Peaky Blinders. Named for their practise of sewing razor blades into the peaks of their caps, they make their money from off-track betting, protection and robbery.

This is the first TV drama by series creator Steven Knight, who said: “The story I want to tell is based on family legend and historical fact.

“It is a fiction woven into a factual landscape which is breathtakingly dramatic and cinematic, but which for very English reasons has been consigned to historical text books.”

Controller of BBC Drama Commissioning, Ben Stephenson, said: “Peaky Blinders is a phenomenally authored drama series shedding light on a piece of hidden British history.”