Get ready for “chaos and destruction” as the BBC releases a deep-dive into Dope Girls

We first reported on Bad Wolf show Dope Girls back in 2023. Now, with the six-part series arriving on BBC One this Saturday, we have a chance to learn a lot more about the cast, characters and creatives in a new media pack.

It is the end of World War One. As Britain celebrates the Armistice on the streets of London, men return from the front expecting to rejoin society and pick up where they left off — but a newly empowered generation of women are loath to simply return to the kitchen.

Using Soho’s expanding illicit underground clubland scene as their playground, women explore previously unimaginable opportunities on either side of the law.

Dope Girls depicts in visceral delicious detail the birth of the modern nightlife industry guided and gilded by hard fought female endeavour.

The series features Julianne Nicholson as Kate Galloway, a single mother who establishes a nightclub amidst the hedonistic uproar of post-World War One London, embracing a life of criminal activities with the dedicated aim of providing for her daughter Evie, played by Eilidh Fisher.

Eliza Scanlen plays Violet Davies, one of the first wave of female officers, who is assigned to go undercover and investigate the illicit world of underground Soho nightclubs. This is where we find Billie Cassidy played by Umi Myers, a dazzling bohemian dancer, whose life is irrevocably changed by Kate’s arrival. Further cast are revealed in the media pack linked above.

Interviews with the Dope Girls cast and creatives

There are interviews with many of those involved, as well as some first-look pictures. Juliet Nicholson quotes Viv Albertine from punk-rock band The Slits:

Bad girls aren’t villains, they’re transgressive forces within patriarchal cultures, when made to choose between wreaking destruction or accepting their powerlessness, they choose destruction

It’s all put more succinctly by Eileidh Fisher:

Dope Girls is about embracing chaos and destruction in order to achieve empowerment at all costs

The show is a joint production with Sony Pictures, who provide this teaser: