Pint-sized nonsense

House of Guinness
NETFLIX

Handsome James Norton, last seen clanging swords as Harold Godwinson in King & Conqueror, is now Rafferty, the foreman of the Guinness brewery in Dublin – this time clanging hammers against fractious Fenians in House of Guinness. In the hands of Steven Knight, creator of the Birmingham gangster drama Peaky Blinders, mid-nineteenth-century Dublin is not dissimilar in atmosphere from the BBC’s eleventh-century England. The weather is perpetually foggy; you can’t walk down a street without getting set upon; most conversations – from the pub to the ballroom – are littered with Anglo-Saxon swearwords; and the commonest expression of the inhabitants is suspicious antagonism. Really, King Harold only had to slip into an Irish accent and a frock coat and the job was done.

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