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If a TV series is what it takes to raise our less-loved cities from ‘cultural cringe’, how about a thriller in, say, Hull?Peaky Blinders is back and, with it, the largest number of Brummie and Brummie-ish accents you’re likely to hear on TV all year, at least until MasterChef makes its recently announced move to Birmingham and Gregg Wallace is forced to start calling everyone “bab”. In the Radio Times last week, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight had a chat with Adrian Chiles about how the series has revived a sense of mythology around the city. “I did think very consciously that what we don’t do in Birmingham – and, in fact, in England as a whole – is mythologise our own environment and be bold about it,” Knight said.It’s certainly true that Peaky Blinders has created a whole mythological industry around it. I’ve written before about the proliferation of Peaky Blinders-themed pub crawls, how you’d be hard pressed to go out in the West Midlands (and beyond) on a Saturday night without seeing at least one flat cap and a waistcoat. Last year, I test-drove a car around a village that the garage owner swore had been a Peaky Blinders filming location and though nothing on Google or, for that matter, on screen could confirm his story, that sense of local pride was palpable. Continue reading...