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Peaky Blinders

I've just watched the first in the new series of the brilliant Peaky Blinders. If you're not a fan, it's a sort of historical drama set in the Black Country in the 1920s. "Sort of" because it does bend credibility in the service of a good yarn, but it's a cracking piece of TV drama. The cast is fab and the production terrific; it has a real period feel to it. The opening episode of Peaky Blinders series 4 finished with a cliffhanger. A bunch of Italian hitmen gun down two of the leading characters outside a farmhouse, seemingly fatally. It was a dramatic scene. Gunsmoke drifted over the bodies. The climbing rose on the farmhouse wall was in full flower. The hedges and trees were that bright green of midsummer. Slightly confusingly, the hoods hid in a cart carrying hay bales. A bit early in the season, to be honest. No matter. Utterly bizarrely, though, was that the scene was specifically set on Christmas morning. And, apart from me, no-one seems to have noticed how strange that was. I guess the producers just didn't realise. Or they thought viewers wouldn't notice that Christmas in 1925 fell in June. Or there was some weird local climate change thing going on around 1920s Birmingham. It's another small but telling example of something I've been rattling on about for years. From the 2.3 million people who watched it there seems to have been nobody who noticed this bizarre lapse. Does this make me a sad freak? I can only guess the producers gambled that most of the folk who watched it don't know what nature in England looks like in late December. They can't have a clear mental image of what nature in England looks like at all. How depressing that everyone is so disconnected from their natural environment.