Dope Girls

Dope Girls: a new post-war story about the women ruling London's nightlife

Dope Girls: Julianne Nicholson as Kate in Trafalgar Square

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.

BBC reveals first-look pictures for new drama Dope Girls

Michael Duke as Eddie Cobb and Umi Myers as Billie Cassidy sit together, looking serious, in front of cracked mirrors indoors. Billie has her arm propped on Eddie's shoulder

The show centres around the clubs and nightlife of 1918 Soho. Men are returning from World War I, and finding women back home far more independent than when they left them.

Each of the six episodes follows all types of people caught in the tangle of clubland. There’s single mum Kate Galloway, played by Julianne Nicholson (Mare of Easttown), who sets up a nightclub to provide for her daughter, Evie (Eilidh Fisher). Billie Cassidy (Umi Myers) is a dancer, whose life is turned upside down by Kate.

Cast announced for BBC’s visceral historical drama Dope Girls

Dope Girls is inspired by the buried history of post-World War One London, where female gangs controlled the drugs, clubs and bootleg liqueur.

Julianne Nicholson (Mare of Easttown) leads the cast as Kate Galloway, a single mother who has begun a life in the hedonistic Soho criminal underworld, by establishing a nightclub to provide for her daughter Evie (Call the Midwife). Umi Myers (Bob Marley: One Love) plays a bohemian dancer whose world gets turned upside down when she begins performing at Kate’s nightclub.