Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight says American rapper Snoop Dogg told him how much he relates to the show.
Mr Knight told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs how the rapper talked about his life and family when the two met, and said the show “reminded him of how he got involved in gang culture”.
Meeting Snoop Dogg made the creator understand Peaky Blinders “is pretty universal”, with people from Eastern Europe to Buenos Aires “getting it and feeling the same thing”.
Mr Knight, who based the hit show and a forthcoming film on stories from his parents and his own childhood in Birmingham, also co-created game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?.
Peaky Blinders followed gangsters in 1920s Birmingham. The show ran for six seasons, from 2013 to 2022, and starred Cillian Murphy, who won the best actor Oscar for Oppenheimer this year, as Tommy Shelby.
Mr Murphy will reprise his role as Shelby in the film version.
The show aired in 180 countries and counts celebrities including Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise among its fans.
Mr Knight described meeting celebrity fan Snoop Dogg and his manager in a room – the rapper smoking, him drinking beer, and the manager gin.
Hearing about Snoop Dogg’s life was “really interesting”, he said.
“It was all about family keeping you in, and escaping from family to do the bad stuff, and then the family relocating their emotions and loyalties to follow you, and then escaping again,” he said.
“He was such a great bloke. He was so nice to talk to,” Mr Knight added.
Mr Knight, who grew up as the youngest of seven kids, said Peaky Blinders was inspired by myth-like stories his parents told him about their childhoods.
When his mother was around eight or nine, she worked for bookmakers – who were called peaky blinders – when betting was illegal.
In her adult life, she worked as a cleaner and in a factory, supergluing grit to the soles of her shoes so she could get to work when it snowed.
His father was a blacksmith who received work from a nearby Romany camp and scrap metal yard.
“The people we would meet were so larger than life, so rebellious, they were so on the other side of the law, but really warm and great people,” Mr Knight said.
He wanted to get some of that “respect for one’s own life” into Peaky Blinders, showing that people living “big, glamorous, dramatic lives” had emotions and passions that “are the same as anybody else”.
Mr Knight said he began writing poetry around the age of 10. His first job after university was writing commercials for local Birmingham radio before he moved to work in radio and production in London.
It was in London where he and two colleagues created Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, the game show that became globally successful.
He also wrote the film Dirty Pretty Things, which was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay in 2004, and three novels.
Mr Knight is now writing a Star Wars script and recently opened a TV and film studio in Birmingham called Digbeth Loc, where the Peaky Blinders film will be shot.
“It’s a fitting end to this part of the story, and we’ve got an absolutely fantastic cast,” the writer said. “I want it to be a sort of legacy for Birmingham, but also a place where people come who want to do different stuff, brave stuff, bold stuff.”
He also started a scheme financing courses for local people to get trained in film industry trades.
“We want this to be absolutely part of the community and for local people to be walking to work,” he said.
Mr Knight said that growing up working class “you have no expectation of yourself” and it took him until he was 35 to think “I can actually do this”.
Now, whenever he gives talks, such as one recently at his old school, he says: “You’ve got to understand you are as good as someone else, you just haven’t had the same guidance.”
Steven Knight is on Desert Island Discs at 10:00 BST on Sunday 11 August and is available afterwards on BBC Sounds.
