Peaky Blinders Creator Warns BBC Period Dramas At Risk

Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight has claimed that expensive period dramas like his show could soon be “killed off” by the BBC.

The broadcasting giant is trying to achieve budget cuts amounting to £500 million over the next two years, The Independent reports. It also recently announced it’s axing hundreds of TV and news jobs.

Speaking to The Times, Steven said that even though he thinks Peaky Blinders would still be commissioned today, he’s not so sure about new entries to the beloved (but costly) format.

“Period drama is expensive because you’ve got to remove all the satellite dishes [from shooting locations] and all of that practical stuff,” he explained (think of the field day the internet had when a Starbucks cup was spotted in a Game of Thrones scene).

“So it may mean that commissioners skew towards contemporary [shows] because there’s a certain cost that they’re not going to have to pay,” he added.

In 2025, The Times of India reported that budgets for period dramas in particular had “skyrocketed”. Some reports suggest that Netflix’s The Crown cost the streamer an eye-watering $130 million (roughly £97 million), for instance.

Recently, the BBC has paired up with other broadcasting companies like BritBox for period dramas like The Other Bennet Sister.

“Some of the best drama that’s come out of this country has been period drama – it’s what we’re really good at. So if suddenly Jane Austen was off the menu, that would be a shame,” Stephen, who is currently working on a Bond script, continued.

The 66-year-old also expressed concern about the quality of programming overall following any cuts.

“We are reaching the point where the unique thing about the BBC is the quality of what it produces,” he stated.

“Once that goes, if that goes, then it would have much more of an effect on the BBC than it would anywhere else. The BBC’s USP [unique selling point] is its quality, so any cuts will inevitably affect quality.”

Speaking to BBC 4 Radio previously, the broadcaster’s interim director general, Rhodri Talfan Davies, said of the cuts: “We need to look at everything, and at a scale of £500m inevitably there are going to be some big and some difficult choices, but we do need to step through this carefully.

“For audiences, the job in hand now over the next three or four months is to work through how we make those changes without damaging the services that we know are critical to the BBC across radio and television and online.”

On their page addressing the cuts, the BBC said its three guiding principles for programme closures are “to sustain output with the highest audience value and impact, [to] meet audiences where they are, reducing spend elsewhere, [and to] make the BBC simpler and faster”.

You can read The Times’ interview in full here.