The period after the First World War is a rich source of material for TV producers, with stories of soldiers coming back from the front, broken mentally and physically by the horrors they endured and struggling to return to the lives they left.

Dope Girls, a new drama currently airing on BBC One, looks at the homecoming from a different perspective – that of the women left behind who stepped into the roles of the absent men and now don’t want to step back.

Jane Tranter, executive producer and CEO of series producers Bad Wolf, was hooked by the idea of “telling that history through the female gaze, which hadn’t been done before”. These women, she said, were waiting and working, then when the men returned, were horrified that “they were going back to their jobs and that the old order of the world was to be restored. The women were simply not ready for that”.

Created in association with Sony Pictures Television, the six-part drama is based on Marek Kohn’s non-fiction book Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground, on the drug and club culture of the early 20th century.

Emmy-winning US actor Julianne Nicholson (Mare of Easttown) stars as Kate, a destitute mother who becomes a player in London’s burgeoning club scene after a tragedy leaves her and her school-age daughter (Eilidh Fisher, The Outrun) homeless.

“There were 150 clubs in Soho at that time,” said Bad Wolf executive producer Kate Crowther. “Pretty much every other basement was a nightclub. It was an exciting kind of scene where bohemian creatives would get together and have parties.” The series has been compared to Peaky Blinders but this time it is women who are rising up through criminality.

Visually, it travels from the muted tones of a backwater country village to the vibrancy and hedonism of alcohol- and drug-fuelled Soho. Soon we witness brutality in police cells as new women police officers seek to prove themselves every bit as tough and ruthless as the men.

In the opening scene, at the peak of end-of-war victory celebrations, Kate, dressed as an angel, plunges into the red-dyed waters of the fountain at Trafalgar Square, emerging reborn as an aspiring queen of London’s nightlife.

Lead director Shannon Murphy said she was focused on capturing the “anarchic energy” that was on the pages of the script by Polly Stenham and Alex Warren, rather than obsessing about the accuracy of the period details.

“I am interested in the details of that time but we are telling a story about fictional characters and we want to have creative licence,” she said. “The goal was to make a modern audience feel like the camera had just been dropped into that time and they were all experiencing this.”

Though set in London, much of Dope Girls was filmed in Wales, where the production team recreated the streets, alleyways and underground bars of bustling post-war Soho. The first “London” nightclub shown was actually in the basement of a Welsh castle.

Production designer Sherree Phillips studied photographs from the era to build the backdrop for this new world: “We were looking at the people at the forefront of the artistic movement then. We show a small sliver of a taxidermy giraffe, and that’s because we found a photograph from the time featuring a huge giraffe and were obsessed with it.

“They seem like radical images or ideas but they almost all stem from the amazing creative work of that period.”

Dope Girls was previewed at the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, at an event hosted by RTS Cymru Wales Chair Edward Russell.