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.
Knight mentioned “a sort of cultural cringe”, pointing out that Americans write songs about almost all of their cities, while we seem a bit embarrassed about some of ours. Cultural cringe was coined by the academic AA Phillips in 1950, who used it to describe an Australian sense of inferiority about the country’s culture. In the UK, there are plenty of cities without an inferiority complex. The cultural giants such as Manchester and Liverpool are happy to celebrate their histories and you can’t turn on the telly at the moment without getting stuck in the six-hour vortex of an edgy drama set in Bristol.
But the attention is lopsided. I say this as someone who comes from Lincolnshire, largely celebrated for being flat, and I can’t think of many songs or TV series that mythologise that. Tinie Tempah mentioned Scunthorpe in a song, but only to say he’d never been there. British humour is largely based on taking the piss, specifically out of ourselves, and I suppose that makes it harder to celebrate much of anything.
But British cities are bursting with character and it is a shame to limit stories to the usual ones. Where are the Lichfield romcoms? Why aren’t there more thrillers set in Hull? Knight has proved that we only have to make an effort to instil a bit of local pride and more of it will follow.
Oti Mabuse: the show’s over when you out dazzle the ‘stars’
After seven years and two victories, Oti Mabuse has announced her departure from Strictly Come Dancing. “She leaves a dazzling legacy behind her, as the only professional dancer to lift the glitterball trophy in two consecutive years,” ran the BBC’s official statement, which was sweet, even if it read a bit like an obituary. The ever-popular Mabuse managed to win across the talent divide, securing victories as partner to both Kelvin Fletcher and Bill Bailey; her range is unparalleled and it doesn’t feel like it will be quite the same show without her.
Yet for a while now, Mabuse has been more famous, arguably, than half of the celebrity contestants who do Strictly. She is all over TV, on every channel, presenting, guesting, doing Tipping Point. At the start of a new series, differentiating between pro dancer and famous person is never the easiest of tasks, and sometimes it can feel like the toss of a coin. (If there’s a mention of either TikTok or the word “YouTuber”, I know I’m in trouble.) Watching her team up with someone who once appeared in Hollyoaks in 2009 would feel strange now. She will be missed, but surely it’s time for her next step.
‘Simon Leviev’: you saw the swindle, now get the T-shirt
Viewers who caught the jawdropping Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler will be familiar with Simon Leviev, whose real name is Shimon Hayut, a man alleged by the film to have pulled off a whopping con that parted several women from an awful lot of money.
According to the documentary, he claimed to be the billionaire son of a diamond dealer, wooed women he met on the dating app by flying them around Europe, told them he and his bodyguard, Peter, were under attack, then asked them to send him tens of thousands of dollars. What’s amazing – and tragic and heartbreaking – is that they did.
As the story indicates, we are living through an age that has a complicated relationship with the concept of shame. Leviev, meanwhile, has turned himself into a celebrity. It was wearyingly inevitable. An American talent agency has signed him up. His website flogs T-shirts with “catchphrases” from the film, charmingly reviving his panicked message, “Peter’s hurt, send money”, by emblazoning it on the chest; you can add a personalised video for $200.
I wonder if he’d do an impression of the women who thought they loved him sobbing at the mountain of debt they racked up so he could have a lavish holiday in Mykonos with a new girlfriend. In his first interview since the film, he denies being a conman as alleged – the two years in prison in Finland for fraud must have been an anomaly – but then again, he is selling NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which does seem like a reliable indicator of character. The women who spoke on the documentary about their experiences, meanwhile, have been trolled.