By Evoke Staff

Copyright evoke

There’s nothing more invigorating than a good punch-up at a funeral. Especially when it’s fuelled by Guinness.

The eulogy to Sir Benjamin Guinness in this eight-part drama paid tribute to a man ‘who brought peace and prosperity to the people of Dublin’.

Did the speaker really say that with a straight face? Because a riot was breaking out on the streets as the hearse was wheeled in procession to the cathedral in House of Guinness.

Of course it was. Creator Steven Knight – the man behind Peaky Blinders – doesn’t really do peace.

‘We will no longer suck black porter from the teats of the English oppressor’, bellowed Patrick Cochrane (Séamus O’Hara) of the Fenian Brotherhood as he led one attack.

That was a bit rich because we later discovered that Cochrane was partial to a drop of the black stuff, as long as it was stolen.

Meanwhile, temperance campaigners burned Sir Ben in effigy and called him a ‘brewer of sin and debauchery’. Whatever happened to not speaking ill of the dead?

It was a fast-moving, tumultuous opening, spoiled only by background music from Kneecap, the controversial Belfast hip-hop outfit – a clumsy intrusion of modern politics into the Victorian age.

And the drama kept coming: An arson attack at the brewery, simmering family tensions as well as the suggestion of secrets and blackmail.

Yet there’s a barrel-sized flaw in the plot of House of Guinness. We already know how it ends.

When Knight devised Peaky Blinders, it was a safe bet that most viewers weren’t familiar with gangland Birmingham at the turn of the 20th century.

However, Guinness is still going strong. The family were in charge until the 1980s. The Fenians can plot and rage as much as they like, but they’re not going to win.

So viewers are left with the famous brewing family squabbling – like Succession but with frock coats and a lot more alcohol.

Eldest son Arthur Guinness (Anthony Boyle) expects to inherit, but has no interest in business. He clearly has sexual secrets, which will put him at the mercy of clever, scheming Fenian Ellen Cochrane (Niamh McCormack).

Edward (Louis Partridge) is the business brain, and wastes no time after the death of Benjamin. He negotiates a deal with Arthur at the wake that will leave his brother as a sleeping partner.

That leaves feckless Benjamin Jr (Fionn O’Shea), a drunken gambler, and their sister Anne (Emily Fairn), who keeps order in the family but has a secret of her own.

Anne is married, but she is having a steamy affair with the family brewery’s charismatic foreman and fixer Seán Rafferty (James Norton). Frankly, who could blame her? Strutting and self-confident, he dominates every scene in which he appears.

At one point, Anne canoodles with him in the street in full view of the family butler. In a stricter television household, isn’t that a job for a blackmailing housemaid?

Watch the full trailer for House of Guinness below