Wow. We’ll get to that final moment in a minute, but first let’s look back to where it all began.

In our review of the first episode we called Tommy Shelby ‘the conquering Alexander wearing a crown of razor blades’  (We did. Honest), and over the past six weeks we’ve watched as Tommy the Great has expanded his Brummie Empire through cunning and violence to the point where he’s a legitimate power in every sense of the words.

When is a show’s finale not its finale?

Peaky Blinders‘ penultimate episode has the dramatic neatness of a conclusion, cemented by the ominous sensation of finality as Tommy Shelby dramatically commutes through a graveyard (he’s always walking, even though he owns one of the few motorcars around), and yet we haven’t reached the end quite yet.

It’s almost as if the abrasive industrial landscape of Birmingham scours away the principles of all who set foot in its dark and vice-riddled back streets. The same can be said of Birmingham back in 1919 too (we kid, we kid!), because as Peaky Blinders reaches its fourth episode, people are willing to compromise almost every principle in order to get what they want.

As Mel Brooks fans already know, ‘It’s good to be the king’. And despite living over 60 years before the movie History of the World: Part 1, Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) knows it too. Shame he’s building his power on such a massive foundation of enemies. Keep at it though, Tommy – it makes for great drama.

Autumn’s drawing its brittle fingers around us, so you know what that means: it’s time to enjoy a bowl of soup, a blast of central heating, and for a sumptuously knitted BBC Two Slanket of period drama to be thrown over us.