By India Block

Copyright standard

There’s an urban legend that peak Peaky Blinders left the UK’s barbers traumatised after so many men requested Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby haircut only to be wildly disappointed with the result. They can rest easy, then, in the knowledge that House of Guinness will not spawn a wave of unflattering imitation hairstyles. Set in the 1800s, the characters are all sporting bouffants of varying lusciousness with nary a side shave in sight. Perhaps it will be the Turkish hair transplant doctors who will be besieged this time around.

Hair or not, whether writer and producer Steven Knight can recreate the magic of Peaky Blinders remains to be seen.

Most of the elements of his trusty formula are here in House of Guinness, with much brawling between brooding men of the past, all set to modern music. We open in Dublin, 1868, where the streets are febrile as sectarian violence threatens to spill blood and beer at the death of Guinness patriarch Sir Benjamin. The brewing titan, a devout Protestant, has always hewn close to the British and their world-sprawling Empire, which facilitates the export markets for Guinness products.

Irish Catholic nationalists — the Fenians — would like to give British colonisers the boot, along with bootlickers like the Guinnesses. Sir Benjamin’s demise has also left behind a power vacuum for his four children of varying ability and levels of character depth. Eldest son Arthur (Anthony Boyle) has returned from London having acquired cravat-wrangling skills but lost his Irish accent, much to the disgust of his youngest brother Edward (Louis Partridge), who remained in Dublin to learn the business by heart. Sir Benjamin’s will, it transpires, will insist they manage their inheritance together, which goes about as well as one would imagine.

In the middle is Benjamin, or Ben (Fionn O’Shea), who is troubled by something other than the historic precursor to The Troubles. And finally the deeply relatable eldest (and only) daughter Anne (Emily Shea), who has to try and keep these idiots from strangling each other or disgracing the family. It’s a pretty juicy setup, and I was hoping that Knight would turn House of Guinness into something like Succession, only with more Stout.

Alas, his oeuvre involves less boardroom wrangling and more fist fighting, weapons and things going boom. Guinness factory foreman Sean Rafferty (James Norton, doing his best at an Irish accent) is essentially the Guinness’s enforcer, leading the charge against the Fenians (you can tell who they are because they are wearing tweed and looking rakish, versus wearing a tophat and looking rakish). Thus the plot is off to a pacey start, and I’ll spare you the spoilers but it gets even more tangled and messier along the way.

Another Knight signature is the anachronistic needledrop, which is a little hit and miss here unfortunately. Of course, that’s partly because Knight helped popularised the craze for soundtracking scenes of high drama with something definitely not from the period. But it also served to take me out of the narrative at regular intervals as I googled the lyrics and puzzled over their meaning, before falling into an internet rabbithole.

There’s a particularly egregious application of Kneecap’s Get Your Brits Out in the first episode, where Rafferty and his gang is whaling on the Catholic protestors. I think it was chosen to make Norton’s character look cool and edgy, only Kneecap would 100 per cent be on the side of the Fenians in this scenario. From there I only spiralled into musing about how, as an anti-monarchist socialist myself, I was struggling to connect with this family of capitalists exploiting their workers in order to climb the ranks in the colony.

The Shelbys, with their anarchic gangster ways and lingering trauma from the war, felt more accessible despite all the razor-attacks and, you know, actual crime. But building an empire of any kind always involves terrible acts. Really, what House of Guinness is currently missing is an ultimate power fantasy figure like Tommy Shelby — broken yet ready with the perfect quip and and deadly aim at a moment’s notice. Men want to be him, women want to fix him, and vice versa frankly. And while Rafferty almost fits the bill (he’s dark and brooding, at least), he has hardly any power. Boring.

Which is all very annoying, because if you switch your brain off House of Guinness is as delicious as a pint of the black stuff, if not as nutritious. The sets and costumes are high budget, the violence wonderfully gratuitous. It doesn’t quite split the G, but it gets real close.

Streaming now on Netflix