Toffs, wideboys, drug lords and jokes that are almost Carry On Cartel. This is a real blast: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen season two

The Gentlemen (Netflix) 

Rating:

Early release, who'd want it? Ray Winstone doesn't. Playing the drugs baron Bobby Glass, as The Gentlemen returns, he's banged up in HMP Leyhill and having a lovely time.

Bobby spends all day in his luxurious sauna overlooking the river, when he isn't lazing in his hot tub with an 'expresso' and a Cuban cigar. Two prison officers stand watch, ready to fetch him phones, snacks or anything else his criminal heart desires.

But I worry about him. Bobby is doing a ten-year stretch for tax fraud, a sentence that under Labour's drive to empty the jails will see him sent home after just 30 months. Since he's been banged up from the start of the first series, in 2024, he must be due for his discharge papers.

Where will he find such luxury on the outside? Perhaps at Badminton House, the Cotswold stately pile that doubles as the ancestral home of former Army captain-turned-marijuana kingpin Eddie, the 13th Duke of Halstead (Theo James).

Eddie isn't short of a bob or two, and could certainly afford a gold-plated hot tub. But, as the show begins another run, he has bigger ambitions – to restore the family estates to the glory of centuries past. 

'All the land down to the coast,' he tells gamekeeper and occasional hitman Geoff (Vinnie Jones), 'I want it back.'

Since Badminton is a good 25 miles from the sea, that's going to require some funds. And Eddie has a plan worth a trillion quid or two.

He's going to corner the European weed supply, manipulate the government into decriminalising cannabis, and get rich by going legit.

If this doesn't make sense, director Guy Ritchie helps us understand the backstory (and identify the influx of new characters, including Aisha, played by Maya Jama) with captions and plot notes scrawled across the screen in yellow marker pen.

These include a helpful explanation about 'kedgeree', the Duke's favourite breakfast and (according to the yellow squiggles) an 'Anglo-Indian dish dating from the 1800s, combining rice, fish, egg and curry'. So now you know.

Refusing this treat, a tubby figure in a flannel shirt and tweed waistcoat declares: 'It is impossible to trump the kipper.' This is our first glimpse of Hugh Bonneville, a Conservative peer and scion of the aristocracy, right down to the gold signet ring on his little finger.

Lord Grantham is here for the shooting – no, hang on, he's playing a chap called Lord Hawthorne, though it's difficult at first to tell these two Bonneville characters apart, since both possess an intellect that glows with the faint glimmer of a five-watt bulb. I hope Hugh isn't getting typecast.

Gradually, though, it becomes apparent that Lord H is not the decent, moral, upstanding fellow you'd expect from his cuddly exterior. He has a taste for rough, young men and 72-hour sex parties. Fancy that.

Also among the house guests is Cico Maldini, alias Gino de Bambi (Michele Morrone), a boisterous Mafioso with a taste for flamboyant gifts. He presents his girlfriend with a tiger, and doesn't realise she isn't really a cat person until she refers to it as 'a stripy lion'.

During the shoot, Cico gets knocked out by a plummeting partridge, in a moment of comedy so broad, it's almost Carry On Cartel.

But that's Guy Ritchie's trademark, and has been ever since Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, nearly 30 years ago. He teases us and tickles us with one-liners, bad puns and shades of slapstick... then unleashes ultra-violence as though it's all part of the cartoon fun.

If this gangster drama took itself more seriously, the execution of a Lincoln's Inn lawyer at his desk would be too much to stomach – with a clear plastic bag over his head filling up with blood, before his brains are blown out.

But in The Gentlemen, that's all part of the hurly-burly. Geoff will tut-tut, and the Duke will murmur some urbane quip, and the mess will be tidied away as easily as the butler empties the drawing room ashtray of cigar butts after a late night.

The real gristle of the show is provided not by Theo James, who subscribes to the Roger Moore school of eyebrows-only acting, but by Kaya Scodelario. She plays Susie Glass, daughter of Bobby, and the brains behind the Duke's dope empire.

Of all the villains in The Gentlemen, it's the lady that you really wouldn't want to cross.

Amid the capers and the blaggery, Ritchie likes to inject occasional stabs of genuine class satire. Surveying the mix of toffs, wide boys, fools and fakers blasting birdlife out of the sky with antique shotguns, the Duke observes: 'Shoots are never about the killing, they're always about the deal-making. It's an alibi to fuse a collection of disparate rogues.'

This collection of disparate rogues is well worth eight hours of anyone's time. It's a blast.