Stephen Graham and Steven Knight on class, boxing and new drama A Thousand Blows

“I had no idea that he existed. Or that anyone like him existed. This man from Jamaica, who came to London to be a lion tamer and became a boxer…” 

Actor Malachi Kirby is sitting with co-star Stephen Graham at the Café Royal Hotel in London – the exact place where the original Queensberry Rules for Boxing were established in 1867. And he still looks stunned by the true story of Hezekiah Moscow, the man he plays in new Disney+ drama A Thousand Blows.  

“In terms of how it has been documented, you only see Black people of that era in servitude or enslaved,” continues Kirby. “So that was the fascination. Because you don’t hear these stories.” 

You couldn’t make up Moscow’s story. And, luckily, writer Steven Knight didn’t have to. Stephen Graham and Hannah Walters – the husband-and-wife duo behind Matriarch Pictures – wrote to him after they were tipped off about this real-life Jamaican boxer in the East End in the 1880s asking him to script a series. He was floored.  

“Only reality can give you that sort of stuff,” Knight grins.  

It is beautifully brought to the screen. Peaky Blinders fans will be hooked. Just like in Knight’s most famous work, A Thousand Blows explores themes of struggle and survival and class and criminal enterprise in the toughest times and places.  

Stephen Graham himself bulks up impressively to play East End bare knuckle boxing king Sugar Goodson – another real-life pugilist of the era. And Knight’s tale pulls no punches in depicting the brutality of the era.    

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Knight’s genius is in also bringing the real-life story of Mary Carr, queen of the Forty Elephants – an all female gang from Elephant and Castle, London, whose feats of criminality ranged from raiding Harrods and fleeing with hundreds of dresses to pretending to be giving birth in the street while gang members pick the pockets of the gawking masses – into the show. Erin Doherty, who plays Carr, should win all the awards next year.  

“I’d wanted to tell their story for a long time,” Knight says. “I kept thinking, I’ve got to do this soon because somebody’s going to realise how great Mary Carr’s story is. As a gang, they were still around in the early 1950s. I know! Isn’t it incredible? That’ll be in series 22.” 

Realising these three real-life historical figures were all around at the same time Knight knew he had larger-than-life characters to build a world around. (Whether they actually met was moot, because when they meet in this fictionalised version of the era, sparks fly.)  

“Mary is a woman, Hezekiah is from Jamaica and Sugar and his brother Treacle are white Londoners. But the issue of race and gender is subordinate to class in this,” says Knight. 

“Because if you’re cold, you’re cold. If you’re hungry, you’re hungry. In those days, poverty meant ingenuity. Because you did something or died. The Forty Elephants found their ways to make money, men did bare-knuckle boxing because risking their lives was the only way to survive. So there is that toughness.  

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“The thing that unites the three main characters is their class. And the way that is symbolised is that boxing in the East End was bare knuckle for the working class, while in the West End, the Marquess of Queensberry and the Earl of Lonsdale were trying to turn it into a gentleman’s sport where the crowd was supposed to not make a noise. So you’ve got the class system embodied in a pair of gloves. What a gift.  

“At one point you see Sugar throw a pair of gloves into the river. So that is what I wanted to explore – a city that was then as it is now, divided by class.”  

Moscow arrives in England with a dream of being a lion tamer. He has a letter from a zookeeper and his joy is palpable. Then his dream is dashed in a shocking scene that sets him on a new path. 

“It’s just hit me like a brick. He never smiles again after that scene,” says Graham to his co-star Kirby. 

“One of the things for me in the process of playing Hezekiah was counting the blows,” says Kirby, who won acclaim for playing Darcus Howe in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe: Mangrove and also appeared alongside Graham in Boiling Point. 

“There is blow after blow after blow and you see the person he’s becoming as a response to every single one of them. So one of the things that needed to go was his smile and his hope. 

“But I love how this show is set in a part of London where you have people from different backgrounds – Chinese, French, Jamaican, English – united by their class. They are also united by their desire to survive and transcend their circumstances. It has a closeness to my heart because of the environment I grew up in, being from a working-class background, like a lot of the actors on this.” 

Graham agrees. “Sugar has had to fight from when he was a kid. His father was killed and his mother put him and his brother in the workhouse. I based that off Charlie Chaplin. He’s the old guard. He’s the king of his corner. But his world is changing. There’s a gentrification of boxing happening – and a gentrification of London. So that’s another undercurrent in the story.”  

These are the kind of stories writer Knight grew up with. His father was a boxer. And his great uncle was a bare-knuckle boxer.  

“I remember my dad telling me stories about how they would put two barrels together, one man in each barrel so they couldn’t step back, and just beat the hell out of each other. Then the loser was thrown into the canal,” he says.  

“You can’t get any tougher than that. Then they’d have to swim to the lock. It’s the toughness of it. And the fact that when a fist lands on a jaw, it makes that horrible noise. It is a brutal sport but it symbolises what people were having to do to survive. Did I box? No, I write about it. I can’t use these fingers for that!” 

Behind the camera, executive producer Hannah Walters (who also plays Mary Carr’s Forty Elephants deputy leader Eliza Moody) also pushed for wider inclusion.  

“One of the things Hannah was adamant about from the very beginning was finding money within the budget to create opportunities for people from different backgrounds,” explains Graham.  

“And I have never seen a crew like this before. I was so proud of what Hannah did in terms of the diversity of the crew but also kids from projects she found who were able to be trainees on the production. Disney put their hand in their pocket to pay for the opportunities for these kids. 

“Steve McQueen said a wonderful thing to me once. The only way you can create change is by doing it from the inside. And if you are in there and given that opportunity, you have an obligation. That’s my philosophy.” 

As well as fighting for diversity on all sides of the camera, Graham had to fight, for real, in the rudimentary boxing ring. The set of A Thousand Blows is a work of art in itself, an authentic East End street, including the rowdiest of pubs, all built to incorporate the real Victorian at Mortlake Brewery on the Thames. 

It gives the series an atmosphere like no other. And it gave Kirby and Graham a stage on which to perform, in the noisy, chaotic backroom of the Blue Coat Boy pub in Wapping. Sugar Goodson runs the The Blue Coat Boy – where Daniel Mays plays master of ceremonies Punch Lewis with real relish.  

“We spent two months rehearsing the choreography of the fights. It like a dance, isn’t it? And fortunately I was able to come home and practise with my boy, with our Alfie. But every opportunity we’d be in the gym, so by the time we came to shoot, it was locked in.”  

“Those were easily my favourite days,” adds Kirby. “The energy of the supporting artists in the room throughout those long days filming the fights. It made it so easy to do my job. Now I’d love to do a real fight. I’m not trying to challenge anybody, I’m not calling anyone out…” 

Stephen Graham laughs: “I must say, though, I think you could take [celebrity boxer] KSI down – and it would be good for promotion!” 

Kirby grins. But he’s serious about boxing now – a new passion sparked by the story of A Thousand Blows and playing Hezekiah Moscow.  

“I had this conversation with my boxing coach, I was like, I’d love to do at least one real fight in my lifetime,” he says. “I only came into boxing because of this show. I had never done it before. But I definitely developed not just a love for it, but a respect for boxing.” 

There are already plans for more series of A Thousand Blows – if not quite the 22 series Steven Knight was contemplating earlier.  

“You know all the stuff I have done with Shane Meadows, This Is England and The Virtues, and other things like Help and Time. They’re the kind of social commentary work I like to do,” says Graham. 

“Hopefully this is great entertainment. And there is an escapism there. But it is saying something socially and politically as well. If you really look at the subtext, it has got a strong voice. But it whispers quietly. A strong voice but it whispers quietly. Oh, that’s nice. It just came to me – I like that one!” 

A Thousand Blows is out now on Disney+. 

Knight timeline

Steven Knight has been influencing what we watch on TV and beyond for decades…

1959 Born in Marlborough, Wiltshire, before being raised in Birmingham and studying English at the University College, London. 

1984-7 Works at Capital Radio – helps create games for Chris Tarrant’s (left) morning show.

1990-92 Co-writer of Canned Carrott, comedian Jasper Carrott’s sketch show.

1998 Co-creates ITV quiz show sensation Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

2002 Breakthrough film Dirty Pretty Things starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Audrey Tautou and Sophie Okonedo, which he wrote, released to acclaim – including Oscar nomination for Original Screenplay.

2006 Amazing Grace, historical film starring Ioan Gruffudd as William Wilberforce, released.

2013 Knight writes and directs Tom Hardy (above) road movie vehicle Locke.

2013 Peaky Blinders, starring Cillian Murphy (right), launches on BBC2.

2016 Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard star in Allied, written by Knight.

2019 Adapts A Christmas Carol for BBC One, with Guy Pearce in the lead role. 

2021 Kristen Stewart stars as Princess Diana in Spencer, written by Knight.

2023 Adapts Great Expectations for BBC One – featuring Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham.

2023 This Town, set around the two-tone movement in Coventry and Birmingham, airs on BBC One.

2023 Knight is instrumental in establishing Digbeth Loc studios in Birmingham.

2025 Peaky Blinders film, set during the Second World War and filmed at Digbeth Loc, set to be released.

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