Metro
How Who Needs to Be a Millionaire? Paved the Method for Peaky Blinders
That format grew to become an unlimited hit for ITV and around the globe. “It simply went mad,” Knight remembers, remembering a headline within the American press calling the quiz “The Present that Saved the Mouse” on account of its Stateside success for Disney’s then-beleaguered ABC.
Who Needs to Be a Millionaire’s big recognition led to it airing in 120 nations and being translated to 80 languages. That clearly made it worthwhile for its creators. Requested on The Media Present about his earnings, Knight mentioned he has no complaints about his monetary compensation. “It liberated me to have the ability to write stuff that I wished to jot down.” That included Knight’s second characteristic screenplay Soiled Fairly Issues, about two irregular immigrants in London who change into entangled in a homicide. The movie was directed by Stephen Frears, starred Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou, and earned Knight an Oscar nomination for Finest Authentic Screenplay.
The movie and its Oscar nomination “kick-started a very completely different a part of my profession,” Knight (now credited as Steven, not Steve) tells The Media Present. He grew to become a Hollywood screenwriter, writing a sequence of characteristic movies together with the David Cronenberg-directed Jap Guarantees, the award-winning Locke starring Tom Hardy (which Knight additionally directed), and lots of extra.
One of many initiatives Knight now felt liberated to jot down was a interval drama drawn from childhood reminiscences of the tales he’d heard from his household in Small Heath, Birmingham. Knight was sick of the English working courses being portrayed on display screen as pitiful and wan, he wished to – as he informed Den of Geek – “do legends” and mythologise these individuals in the identical manner that US Western movies mythologised cowboys.
In 2014, Peaky Blinders made its BBC Two weeknight debut to a lot bafflement over the title, and rising pleasure from what would change into a worldwide military of devoted followers. It’s quickly to air its closing sequence on BBC One within the status drama Sunday evening slot, and later, on Netflix around the globe – a present which may by no means have existed with out the monetary freedom supplied by Who Needs to be a Millionaire.
Peaky Blinders sequence six begins on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday the 27th of February at 9pm.
