Julianne Nicholson

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.

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.