A pre-Jazz age Peaky Blinders? A post-Great War Trainspotting? Downton Abbey on a three-day bender?
However you bill it, the BBC’s new six-part drama Dope Girls is unlike anything else hitting our tellies this year. A riot of rebellious, unruly hedonism, drenched in vibrant colours and full of in-your-face energy, it’s a hairpin turn of a period piece that chucks the rulebook in the bin to relive the explosion in London clubland in the immediate aftermath of World War 1. ‘This is not a typical period drama,’ notes producer Jane Tranter, with understatement.
Co-directed by Babyteeth’s Shannon Murphy and Killing Eve’s Miranda Bowen, and made by Industry and Dr Who production house Bad Wolf, it comes with the best bona fides – and an unexpected making-of story. Because none of the 1910s Soho was filmed within 150 miles of London.
Murphy and production designer Sherree Philips give us the lowdown on how Dope Girls brought London’s hardest-partying era to the screen.
What is Dope Girls about?
The series is based loosely on Marek Kohn’s 1992 book Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground, a non-fiction account of the early days of Soho’s underground nightclub scene and the scandalising spread of hard drug use to polite society.
Real-life figures like Jamaican jazz musician Edgar Manning, West End actress Billie Carleton, and Kate Meyrick, the Irish nightclub queen who ran the infamous jazz club at The 43 Club on Soho’s Gerrard Street – think The Box for the Roaring ’20s – inspired Dope Girls’ fictionalised recreation of this heady era in London life. ‘It's the Soho of our imagination,’ says Murphy.
Instead of Kate Meyrick, meet Kate Galloway (Paradise and Mare of Easttown’s Julianne Nicholson), a widow who spots an opportunity to grab a space on the West End club scene and sets up Club 33, a below-ground den of performance art and high living. Helping her carve this boozy niche is her estranged daughter Billie Cassidy (Umi Myers), a dancer, and Billie’s musician friend Eddie Cobb (Michael Duke),
Not taking this particularly well is Italian crime moll Isabella Salucci (Geraldine James), whose club and liquor racket is directly threatened, and whose psychotic son (Dustin Demri-Burns) is a blunt instrument of retribution.
Meanwhile, enigmatic outsider Violet Davies (Babyteeth’s Eliza Scanlen) joins the police, dealing with sexism and violent bullying to go undercover in Soho’s underground nightclubs.
Where was Dope Girls filmed?
To capture the anything-goes energy of 1918 Soho and the Clerkenwell haunts of the Salucci family, as well as the Georgian mansions and farmhouses of the day, Dope Girls headed not to W1 but South Wales where the vividly louche world of the show – clubs, chemists, bars, police stations, bohemian flats and liquor-filled warehouses – was painstaking assembled in micro-detail via a combination of sets and real-world locations. Here’s how it was done.
1918 Soho were recreated in a studio in South Wales
An old Nightingale Hospital in Bridgend was the unlikely home for Dope Girls’ Soho. ‘It looked like The Last of Us when we first walked in,’ remembers Shannon Murphy. ‘Like, there were things growing. I was like, what is this place?’
Fast-forward and the interior of the building was transformed into a recreation of 1918 Soho so realistic, it’d confuse an Edwardian – including a total reconstruction of Gerrard Street of the time. ‘We were filming over winter in Wales, so we had to build it inside as relief from winter and rain,’ says Philips.
