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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 Phillips 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 Phillips.
Nightclubs inspired by true-life spots like The 43 and The Caravan Club are portals into a loose and licentious underworld in Dope Girls. IRL they could be underwhelming to look at. ‘The interior of the Caravan Club was just a wooden box on the ground and a few couches and armchairs,’ says Phillips. ‘For our characters, these clubs aren’t all about flaunting girls and getting drunk – they’re about performance art.’ The show’s set design reflects that flamboyant side more than their real-world equivalents.
Trafalgar Square was filmed on a volume stage in Cardiff
Dope Girls opens on November 18, 1918, with Billie and Kate dressed like angels and celebrating the end of World War I with an army of revellers in Trafalgar Square. The sequence, a headtrip through London’s wildest ever party, was filmed using a volume stage, a semi-circular screen and a real fountain at Bad Wolf’s studio in Cardiff.
‘We couldn't shoot in Trafalgar Square because it's very expensive,’ says Murphy. ‘But it was extraordinary to create that energy and those crowds for those scenes and it's a really impressive backdrop to be able to play with.’
The sequence demanded a deep dive into the records of the day. ‘There was so much research done, right down to each individual street post and window.’ Even the weather that day was researched and replicated. One tweak? The pavement, Tarmac back then, was adjusted to something less visually overwhelming.
Kate’s cottage was shot at Merthyr Mawr House, Bridgend
The first episode opens with working mum Kate Galloway (Nicholson) losing her job and her home and heading to London in a state of destitution with her teenage daughter Evie (Eilidh Fisher). Her rural cottage is located just outside Bridgend IRL. ‘We painted everything and wallpapered because it was very rundown,’ Phillips says. ‘And there's quite a lot of the [visual] effects on the exterior as well, just to make it fit the time period.’
📍Here’s how to visit Merthyr Mawr House
The disused Tube tunnel was filmed at The Tunnel, Barry Island
An old 280-yard railway tunnel that once connected Barry Island with the rest of Wales, this dank space, now used as a rifle range, was transformed into an underground refuge for Soho’s womenfolk. ‘It was an incredible set,’ says Phillips. ‘We built a carcass of a tube train – a carriage that we turned upside down and then burnt – to make this a safe harbour where women lived. It’s a new community, basically.’
New Scotland Yard was shot at Swansea Guildhall
Another strand of the narrative follows desperate young woman Violet Davies as she enlists to join the Metropolitan Police and runs the gauntlet of abuse and bullying to get her badge. The real-life history was no less sexist. The then-police commissioner Sir Nevil Macready offered wannabe policewomen the coolest welcome, saying that he did not want any ‘vinegary spinsters’ or ‘blighted middle-aged fanatics’ on the force.
To capture the cold, classical spaces of New Scotland Yard, Dope Girls took up temporary residence in Swansea’s Guildhall building. ‘Sadly, that building was made in 1930, but it’s been looked after very well,’ says Phillips. ‘It was difficult to find something that looks of that time.’
Danton’s Nightclub was filmed at Margam Castle, Port Talbot
A Tudor Gothic Mansion dating back to 1830, Margam Castle is the unexpected location for the scenes of the Salucci’s nightclub Danton’s. The castle, which has appeared in Dr Who and revenge thriller Apostle, is no stranger to film shoots, although Dope Girls is the first to head down to the cellar. ‘They don’t usually use the area we used because it’s where their storage is,’ laughs Phillips.
‘We wanted to make it feel that it was wet and dark and not a very nice place to hang out. It wasn't an establishment with beautiful fabrics and celebrities.’
📍Here’s how to visit Margam Castle
When can I watch Dope Girls?
Episode 1 airs on BBC One at 9.15pm on Saturday, February 22. Further episodes screen at the same time every Saturday until March 29.
Anyone wanting to binge the show can find all six episodes on BBC iPlayer from 6am on Saturday, February 22.
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