How did one of the world’s most famous television competitions pave the way for Peaky Blinders?

Before the show, Stephen Knight created the format Show do Milhão!

Peaky Blinders became a worldwide TV phenomenon due to its drama centered around the Shelby family mafia, but did you know that the show’s creator was also one of those responsible for Million Show?

Stephen Knight has a long career in British television producing and writing television specials and commercials. Eventually, in 1997, he teamed up with Mike Whitehill as well as Paul Smithwho worked in the same production company as him and with the producer David Briggs introduce the concept of a new game show per channel ITV.

As Knight himself explained in a 2019 radio interview BBC Sounds:

“The original idea was for a show where you could earn an infinite amount of money, where you could keep participating forever, but the questions became more and more unresolvable. Since no insurance company would finance this, we had to come up with a limit, and a million sounded great.”

This is how Stephen Knight and his colleagues envisioned the show to be. Who want to be a millionaire?, which quickly became one of the biggest hits on British television. The format was sold to the whole world and is responsible for saving the American broadcaster. ABC. In Brazil, the format was bought and became a program Million Showone of the biggest hits on national television presented by Silvio Santos.

The Show do Milhão format, one of SBT’s biggest hits, was invented by the creator of Peaky Blinders.

This worldwide success, according to Knight himself, allowed the creator to write the designs he really wanted. From there, he continued to write dramas and thrillers such as Beautiful and dirty things (2002), which was nominated for Oscar for best original screenplay, crime bosses (2007) and Locke (2013), cast Tom Hardy.

It was through a string of hits that Stephen Knight built a strong enough reputation to pull off a dream project: a TV series based on stories he heard as a child on Small Heath, in the English countryside, especially from his family who have a connection to local crime.

So, Peaky Blinders only happened because Steven Knight scored game show so successful that it gave him the freedom to take more risks.

The entire series is available in Netflixand a final film is in development, as well as possible spin-offs.