Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight has returned to another very Irish story for his latest project - epic new Netflix drama House of Guinness.
The new eight-part series tells the saga of Ireland's most famous brewing family, and this being Knight, it mixes grit and grime with political chicanery, betrayal and family feuding.
It also features a very rich cast of characters, including fast-rising Irish actor Anthony Boyle as the mischievous Arthur Guinness, Louis Partridge as his upright and proper brother Edward, and Niamh McCormack as a firebrand Fenian rebel, who makes it her mission to bring the brewing dynasty down.
For 66-year-old Knight, it is a return to familiar territory. The father of seven and son of a blacksmith grew up in Birmingham, the second city setting of Peaky Blinders, and House of Guinness tells a similar inter-generational family story.
However, the origins of the new series began over ten years ago when real-life Guinness heiress Ivana Lowell wrote a 20-page treatment for a TV drama about her famous family’s storied history.
She had been watching Downton Abbey and was nonplussed - as she told the BBC recently, "Our family history was a lot juicier and more interesting than this - plus it was all true."
After several false starts, Ivana’s idea reached Knight, who once owned a brewery himself, and the results can be seen on Netflix from today.
The show opens in 1868 with the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness, grandson of brewery founder Arthur. The contents of his will leave his four children, Anne, Edward, Arthur and Edward, confused and unhappy, and it leads to the family feuding at the heart of the show.
It is feverish and frantic stuff with plenty of Peaky energy, and it's brim-full of memorable characters, not least of whom is James Norton as the Guinness family’s enforcer, who punches and bed hops his way around Victorian Dublin.
Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, Knight, who is also writing the new James Bond movie, said, "I wanted to reflect, where possible, the reality of the era. It’s worth bearing in mind at the very beginning that these people were very young, Edward and Arthur and the others were in their early twenties when this legacy, you could also call it a burden, was given to them.
"I have kids that age, and I imagined how they’d respond, and they’d respond with energy and the Guinness family fight each other and fight the circumstances. I wanted it to feel like a young person’s story, and I think that gives it energy. There’s gotta be a bit of chaos, there’s gotta be a bit of conflict."
A lot of the action takes place in dank alleyways and docksides at night, smoky alehouses, and the airy ballrooms of Dublin’s monied upper classes. Let’s call it brewing bad - trouble is always stirring and, well, everything is always coming to a head.
Knight says the real Guinness family were fully supportive of the new drama.
"We were, at all times, very keen that we win the approval of the family, and I think we did. Ivana is a consultant, and that really helped executive produce the show.
"We always had an eye on how the family would respond, but these are historical events, so they’re out there in the public domain, but at no point did we want this to stray from what the Guinness family would feel is accurate and fair, and I think we’ve achieved that."
Following his huge hit with Peaky Blinders, which told the story of the half-Irish Shelby family in Birmingham, Knight has been drawn back to another very Irish story with House of Guinness.
"It’s funny - when you’re writing stuff, I don’t see a pattern; I just write stuff," he says. "And then someone says this is another Irish story, and I think - you’re actually right.
"I am drawn to Irish stories. I think that in Irish... entanglements and complications there is always something more extreme. There is that drama that is less spoken and more action.
"The reason I do this job is that I love to write dialogue and I love to write Irish dialogue. I’ve always been surrounded by Irish people talking, and there is just something about that way of speaking that suits the way I write."
And he hopes English viewers of the show might learn something about Irish history. "Yeah," Knight says, "All you can do is put it out there. What I’ve tried to do is have history happen to the characters rather than the characters go out and seek history because that’s the way history happens - it happens to us and it’s how you respond to that.
"What I always hope in anything I do is that people look it up - go on the internet and look it up and make up your own mind."
And maybe in the grand - or not so grand - tradition of Netflix hit The Crown, there is a lot of story to tell here.
Asked how far in history he plans to take House of Guinness, Knight says, "Till 2026 . . . I’m being flippant! Seriously, this story has got so much going for it and so many things happening . . . there’s no announcements to be made but my ambition would be to keep telling this story."
House of Guinness is available to watch on Netflix
