Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight has shared how his encounter with US rapper Snoop Dogg changed his view of the drama he had created as a love letter to his native Birmingham, a city in the middle of the UK.

The prolific writer and producer can count A-listers including Barack Obama, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt among the fans who have expressed their love for the show, which ran for six seasons until 2022. But it was meeting Snoop that made him realise just how big the show really was – and that it had brought home to him the universal nature of the show “with people from Eastern Europe to Buenos Aires getting it and feeling the same thing.”

Peaky Blinders was inspired by Knight’s own childhood in Birmingham, where his mother worked for local bookmakers at a time when betting was illegal. The drama was based on stories Knight learned about local gangsters,...