Peaky Blinders, series 6, episode 1, review: goodbye Aunt Polly, hello teetotal Tommy

For a show hewn from pomp, crunching guitars and in-yer-face swagger, how clever to take our breath away with birdsong. In normal circumstances, 60 minutes of Peaky’s sweltering, lads’ mag machismo is ended with a burst of music – usually the blacksmith’s clang of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Red Right Hand.

However, on this occasion, the credits rolled to the softest of chirrups, following a tribute to Helen McCrory, the actress and Peaky Blinders (BBC One) stalwart, who died last year. For a moment, the world stopped. A minute’s silence, not a minute’s applause. As it should be.

Before that: all the boom, bluster and bar fights you could shake a vintage switchblade at. Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy, with the hardest working cheekbones on television) didn’t shoot himself in that muddy field at the end of series five, following his failed attempt to kill Oswald Mosley. He did, however, learn that it was the IRA who foiled the assassination. They killed McCrory’s Aunt Polly, too. “We have made some changes to the structure of your organisation,” they said, like a malevolent HR department.

Instead, we found our gangster-cum-Labour MP (they all have second jobs, don’t they?) on a barren rock off Newfoundland, four years on, teetotal and, like so many Brits before him, trying to crack America.

It’s 5 December 1933, the day before the end of Prohibition, and Miquelon Island’s bootleggers are very grumpy and very French. Tommy swooped about the place like Clint Eastwood – the keening of Morricone’s trumpet replaced by the crunch-crunch-squeal of Anna Calvi’s guitar – quoting William Blake, ostentatiously drinking tap water and trying to replace the illegal booze trade with an illegal opium trade. At one point he shoots a pigeon. It is, as everything is in Peaky Blinders, very, deliberately, tediously cool.

Shelby sets himself up a new foe – the Boston kingpin uncle of Gina (Anya Taylor-Joy, lumbered with a stinker of a role) – because he always needs a foe, but otherwise the Peaky theme park remains open with most of the rides still running. If the show had a smell, it would be a mix of aftershave and lager; the whole thing still thrums with the febrile energy of a Friday night out with the lads about to turn nasty.

This sixth and final series will go out with a bang – but then every episode of Peaky Blinders does. They begin with a bang, they rattle and clatter all the way through, fists clenched, and they end with a bang. Except for this one, which gave us the birds and a rare moment of peace.