hello and welcome to my easy to understand guide to peaky blinders and Industry this video is going to be particularly relevant for you if you are studying educast a level media studies as peaky blinders currently appears as a set text on that specification from 2024 onwards Stephen Knight was the creator of peaky blinders Stephen Knight grew up in a small Heath area of Birmingham and so I had quite a lot of knowledge of this rural Regional area of Britain he'd written several other very successful films and TV programs things like dirty pretty things hummingbird Eastern Promises and all of those were kind of crime dramas that focused on social issues and working class concerns so he had history and a reputation of working on very similar very successful products his desire to create the show and him being involved actually helped to attract things like funding and companies to work with him bbc2 was the channel that actually got involved with helping to fund the show um and commissioning tiger aspects and other companies to produce it so for example there were two production companies involved both for Indie um this was uh Karen manderbach Productions um and uh there was also tiger aspect both Independence quite smallish production companies although tiger aspect does have a lot of experience in producing TV shows but they also included the Yorkshire screen fund which is an organization that is specifically there to give funding to Media products like films and TV shows that are going to represent particular Regional areas of Yorkshire Karen mandelbak Productions um has an secretary producer Karen Manda back strangely enough he is very experienced had won several Emmys as well so having her involved for BBC Two um was also um good for them it meant that they had a bit more kind of trust and um faith in the quality of the show tiger aspect again was a production company that had worked on a number of other series that had done very well for example cuffs Ripper Street Prisoners Wives Billy Elliot coming down the mountain again a lot of those shows which were based on kind of working class areas of Britain and particularly kind of regional areas of Britain as well having the BBC involved obviously BBC is a public service broadcaster which means that they are not commercial there's no adverts on their channels they are funded by license fees that means that they can afford to take some risks with their programming they don't have to appeal to a massive wide mainstream uh you know audience straight away um they can take risks do something a bit different um and say perhaps you know uh filming something in a regional area of Britain um you know with some caste that are reasonably unknown um it is perhaps a slightly riskier thing that the BBC can do part of their Public Service broadcasting remit is that they inform educate and entertain and they are known for their quality entertaining TV dramas one of their remix also includes representing Britain including all of its Regional areas and so actually part of their remit might require them to have some programming based on other Regional areas not just London and Surrey and so maybe this is part of the reason why they were particularly interested in getting involved in commissioning and partly funding peaky blinders the BBC is regulated by ofcom in the UK and in 2018 ofcom did a report into how the BBC was not fulfilling its remit to represent read Regional areas of the country well enough they also identified that the BBC was not doing enough to represent working class Britain and this may explain why the BBC was then very eager to fund and produce a program like peaky blinders the BBC had been systematically moving all of their Studios and offices up north as well so this helped them they were wanting to film more products in northern areas of Britain anyway and being that they are the BBC it means that they have a certain reputation they have a certain amount of money available to them and they can produce content that is therefore going to be quite quality and is going to have a good reputation and branding already this meant that they had a rough budget of around 1.5 million dollars per episode one of the first things they did was to employ certain costs in order to try and attract audiences and and give their show some kind of sellability if they wanted to sell it to a more Global audience so um Cillian Murphy who is an actor who'd been familiar to audiences from films like 28 Days Later he was cast in the kind of lead role you also had Sam Neal who would have been familiar to audiences from Jurassic Park Helen McCrory would have been familiar to audiences from things like the Harry Potter franchise and also from Skyfall David Dawson would have been familiar to audiences from things like Luther and Ripper Street Tommy Flanagan was familiar to some audiences from Sons of Anarchy and of course Tom Hardy was also in peaky blinders in several episodes and would have been familiar to audiences from a huge variety of films and TV programs because of the funding from the Yorkshire screen fund most of the filming for the show was focused in places uh within Yorkshire so places like Leeds but also was filmed in places like Liverpool Blackpool Birmingham Etc some of these places have quite strong accents and some of the cost could do quite strong accents or had quite strong accents but they actually had to tone some of the accents down and make them slightly less intense because they found the audiences in test um viewings were struggling to understand the accents and in particular Global audiences from places like America and the intention was always to try and sell the programs other countries like America and if those audiences were going to struggle to understand the accents that would make that harder so toning down the accents was there so toning down the accents was done to try and increase the accessibility for a variety of audiences the first series of the show was released on BBC Two from 2013 onwards later series were actually moved Series 5 and 6 were actually moved on to BBC One and this reflects the success of the show at that point and how well it was doing that the BBC felt that it deserved a more Prime Time mainstream uh slot on BBC One it was also available on iPlayer and that helped to Target a more modern audience that you know is often more focused on streaming and now peaky blinders is also available on things like Netflix and Amazon Prime too reflecting this move away from set schedules Netflix is also very focused on telling um local stories to Global audiences that's part of its kind of remit as a company and so this really fits into that kind of part of their company uh branding the BBC does have an international distribution subsidiary BBC America however they didn't distribute this internationally straight way the BBC approached the Weinstein Company and endemol in America and they distributed the first couple of series of peaky blinders and I suppose that helped it reached a more Global audience Weinstein Company and end them all quite big companies however um the Harvey Weinstein who as the kind of chief executive of the Weinstein Company was involved in a big Scandal as part of the me too movement uh where it was uncovered that he'd been involved in a number of sexual assaults and rape sexual harassments and so the BBC made a conscious decision to move away from that company as Distributors to try and avoid public Scandal um and and so they actually stopped them Distributing and ended up selling the rights to Netflix there are rumors that there is going to be a peaky blinders movie um so uh you know franchising and and increasing the number of products for your TV show in order to make extra money so that's my easy to understand guide to peaky blinders and Industry don't forget to check out my channel for other videos that are going to be relevant for 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