Taking family power struggles and turning them into global television sensations is becoming something of a habit for screenwriter Steven Knight.

With Peaky Blinders, he took a Birmingham street gang and made them a cultural force. Now, Knight is betting on another dynasty, one rooted in brewing, wealth and legacy.

House of Guinness, which launches on Netflix on Thursday, tells the story of Ireland’s most famous family name at the moment of crisis – Sir Benjamin Guinness has died and his four children, each concealing dark secrets, are left to steer the brewery’s fate.

Knight says when he looked into the real-life Guinness family, “it was immediate that I realised this is an incredible drama and story”.

He was struck by “the characters, events and how it all intermeshed with history and what was going on at the time”.

While the story is based on real events, it is a drama first and foremost. Fact and fiction have been blended together, but Knight says he doesn’t see those two things as mutually exclusive, as “it’s often the true events that are the least believable”.

“Some of the historical events are so amazing and unexpected you wouldn’t make them up yourself,” he tells the BBC.

One of the imagined figures in the Netflix drama is Sean Rafferty, the brewery’s foreman, played by Happy Valley star James Norton, whose fate becomes entangled with the dynasty’s power struggles.

Norton says his character is an “amalgamation of lots of different people” who existed at the time, adding that he found researching into the history of Guinness “remarkable and fascinating”.

The 40-year-old explains that as soon as he read the script he was ready to sign up to the show.

“I read the first four scripts all at once and it was a no-brainer,” he says. “Almost every scene starts with Rafferty’s silhouette in a window in a cloud of smoke and I thought ‘sign me up, that’s really cool’.”

Most of the actors in the series were Irish, something Norton says added a level of pressure when it came to perfecting the accent and admits he was “so scared on the first day”.

“You work really hard at the beginning and once you crack the first big dialogue scene and have spoken the first lines there’s no going back,” he explains.

The first scene Norton filmed was one where he punches three disloyal workers at the Guinness factory. He says he used the line ‘I see your three names written in black ash up there’ to get back into the accent for subsequent scenes.

Starring alongside Norton is Irish actress Danielle Galligan who plays Lady Olivia, an aristocrat who marries into the Guinness family. After the British monarch, she was the richest woman in Britain and Ireland at the time.

The actress says she loved researching her character and understanding what she was really like.

“She’s such a firecracker in the series and then I actually found out she was also a very solitary and silent woman who painted lots of watercolours,” Galligan explains.

“She was a woman who had everything and yet was still looking for something. Learning about her gave me a sense of her lack of fulfilment and added another layer to her.”

Galligan says it was very special to tell an Irish story and “to do it on a global scale is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience”.

Joining Galligan is Niamh McCormack, whose character is part of the rebellious Fenian Brotherhood, and Jack Gleeson, who is best known for playing Joffrey Baratheon in Game of Thrones.

McCormack and Gleeson say they are proud to be part of a series that puts Ireland on the map, but admit that with pride comes pressure over how it will be received by audiences at home.

“It’s always a factor but I tried not to think about it too much,” Gleeson says. “You want things to be represented well but also hopefully people know not to take it too seriously as a historical document.”

Knight was less worried about what audiences would think, admitting: “I should care but I don’t – if you worry what people are going to think you can’t really do anything as you’d be trying to please too many different people.”

House of Guinness has already been compared to the likes of Succession, The Crown and Peaky Blinders but Knight is indifferent about how people compare it.

“People say every project is a cross between stuff and I don’t take that too seriously, I’m confident that this is its own thing,” he says.

For Norton, who is also currently starring in BBC’s historical drama King & Conqueror, to be compared to such successful shows is a positive.

“To be in the same breath as those dynasty shows is great and I’m happy if we’re included among that group,” he says. Gleeson agrees and explains that this drama “takes the best bits of the rest and adds its own magic and essence”.

Knight does admit that there are many similarities between House of Guinness and Peaky Blinders and the shows have influenced each other as the 66-year-old has recently finished working on the Peaky Blinder film, The Immortal Man, which will see Cillian Murphy reprise his role as Birmingham gangster Tommy Shelby.

“Sometimes parallels are pointed out that I don’t even have a clue about,” he laughs. “But there are a lot of similarities – the family, it has the same energy, humour and swagger.”

Knight is also involved in writing the new James Bond film, which he previously told the BBC had always been on his bucket list.

The movie will be directed by Dune’s Denis Villeneuve and is currently in development and being overseen by Amazon MGM Studios after long-serving masterminds Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson stood down in February.

When asked a question about Bond, Knight smiles and says he’s not able to talk about it but does admit that after the success of several of his shows, he feels a greater freedom to write more creatively.

And with House of Guinness, he hopes to have used that freedom to make this latest dynasty saga a success in its own right.

More than a thousand disabled children across the UK are waiting for wheelchairs and mobility equipment that could transform their lives, Whizz Kidz say.

The charity, which helps wheelchair users up to 25 years old, has been forced to close its specialist wheelchairs waitlist for the first time in its 35-year history.

They say escalating costs and squeezed NHS budgets are creating a “huge demand” for their service, leading to long delays.

NHS England says it’s working with local healthcare providers to deliver better services and NHS Scotland says it’s committed to ensuring vital services were protected.

The Department for Health Northern Ireland says by the end of August, the regional service had delivered 87% of all wheelchair categories within 13 weeks.

Whizz Kidz recorded a thousand children waiting for equipment when it decided to close the waitlist, but say many more are missing out.

BBC News has spoken to two families about the impact the long waits are having on them.

Wren has cerebral palsy, affecting her speech, all four of her limbs and her posture, meaning she needs help with everyday activities.

At home the 11-year-old uses an NHS manual self propelled chair. It took more than a year to get this chair, well over the NHS’s official target of 18 weeks.

While Wren’s mum, Anna, says the arrival of her NHS chair was greatly received – Wren will soon grow out of it.

Anna also told the BBC it’s heavy and cumbersome, meaning Wren can only self propel it a few metres before she needs help.

The family turned to Whizz Kidz when they were told Wren is not eligible for a powered wheelchair through the NHS.

Whizz Kidz provided her with a chair to use at school, but her family is worried that Wren will soon outgrow that chair too.

Using her powered wheelchair at school is “one way for her to assert her independence,” Anna says. “She has great fun whizzing around.”

But the family is unsure when they’ll get a new one when she grows, given the back-log at the charity.

“I don’t want Wren’s world to get smaller as she gets bigger,” Anna says.

“She doesn’t get another childhood and we want to keep the options open for her for whatever she wants to do.”

Whizz Kidz pointed to a number of factors for the increase in demand for their services.

The charity says NHS wheelchair services were implementing a stricter criteria whilst facing squeezed budgets.

It also said costs were escalating across the industry. The average specialist wheelchair costs £4,800, according to the charity, with inflation continuing to push up the cost of equipment.

Sarah Pugh, CEO of Whizz Kidz called the situation” a national crisis”.

“Behind every statistic is a child missing school trips, missing playtime with friends, or living in pain,” she says.

“This cannot be acceptable in the UK in 2025. We urgently need the public’s support to reopen the list – because childhood can’t wait.”

Whizz Kidz has launched the Childhood Can’t Wait appeal, to raise £750,000 to reopen the waitlist and cut waiting times.

Like most teenagers her age, Ivy loves spending days in the park with her friends, shopping and gaming.

But unlike most teenagers, she relies on her friends and family to help her out.

Ivy has single ventricle circulation, a life-limiting heart condition, which means only one side of her heart is working.

Ivy, is able to walk, but only very short distances. It means she’s not eligible for a powered chair, but does have a manual wheelchair from the NHS.

However the exhaustion caused by her condition means she’s unable to propel herself and relies on others to push her.

“I have to rely on my mum to drive me to school—and it’s only a 15-minute walk,” Ivy says.

“I have to have my friends push my manual wheelchair around from lesson to lesson…It’s not fair.”

“I get left out when I’m in the wheelchair because obviously I can’t take myself around.”

Ivy had hoped starting secondary school in 2024 would provide her with more freedom, which is why her mum Emma applied to Whizz Kidz for an electrical attachment for Ivy’s wheelchair to make life easier.

They applied in January that year and are still waiting.

Emma acknowledges that they are not in high need, but says the attachment “would just enhance her [Ivy’s] life massively, to not have to rely on somebody else all the time”.

There’s also a mental and physical toll on the family.

“It gets quite heavy pushing a wheelchair around for 12 hours at a time – your shoulders and your back ache,” Emma says.

Emma’s ultimate goal for Ivy is to live life like any normal teenager and enjoy her life without constraints.

“It would hugely enhance our lives and give Ivy that independence… we would have to make some real big sacrifices to be able to afford the electrical attachment on our own,” Emma says.

The BBC asked the NHS in each part of the UK for their response.

The Department for Health Northern Ireland says by the end of August, the regional service had delivered 87% of all wheelchair categories within 13 weeks.

NHS England told us they offer personal wheelchair budgets for people to pick a wheelchair that meets their individual needs, adding it was working to deliver” better services that improve access and experiences for wheelchair users”.

In Scotland a spokesperson said the government was committed to ensuring vital services were protected and eligibility criteria for the provision of children’s wheelchairs has remained unchanged since 2014.

The Welsh government has not yet responded.