Is Dope Girls based on a true story?

Alongside Scanlen, the series also stars Julianne Nicholson, Umi Myers and Eilidh Fisher. But how much of the series is based on real history and how much of it is fictional?

Read on for everything you need to know about the true story behind Dope Girls.

Is Dope Girls based on a true story?

As is written on screen at the start of each episode of Dope Girls, the series is "inspired by a forgotten time in history", but "all events and characters are fictional".

The series takes its title from Marek Kohn's non-fiction book Dope Girls: The Birth Of The British Drug Underground, but executive producer Jane Tranter has noted that the series pulls from a "number of different pieces of source material".

"What [writers] Alex [Warren] and Polly [Stenham] did was a fictional piece that was based on a number of different pieces of reading that they'd done," Tranter continued, "of which Dope Girls had most comprehensive breadth in explaining what that period of time was like, and it had the coolest title.

"And so that's why we optioned Dope Girls. But the piece is based on the results of Alex and Polly's imaginations, and very marvellous they are too."

The series is very loosely inspired by the life of Kate Meyrick, a woman born in Ireland in 1875 who went on to build a nightclub empire at the end of the First World War, and became known as "the most dangerous woman in London".

Meyrick separated from her husband, a doctor, in 1918, and found herself struggling financially as the single mother of eight children. She entered the nightclub business in 1919, opening her first venue in Leicester Square.

She went on to operate several clubs, in which recreational drugs were taken and prostitution was rife. She went on to serve five prison sentences at different times, but continued to operate the clubs until she died in 1933 at the age of 57.

The series also explores the role that the first female police officers played in the early 1900s. In reality, the first British woman to be appointed a police officer with full powers of arrest came in 1915, while the London Metropolitan Police first recruited 110 women in 1919.

However, these recruits were unattested policewomen, meaning they did not have the powers of arrest. In 1922 their numbers were cut to just 24, after a Parliamentary committee recommended getting rid of female recruits entirely.

What have the team behind Dope Girls said about its historical accuracy?

The cast and crew behind Dope Girls have spoken extensively about the show's portrayal of the post-war period.

Julianne Nicholson, who plays Kate Galloway in the series, said that the team behind the show had done "such a beautiful job with taking this period in history but completely turning it upside down".

Meanwhile, Tranter said at a recent Q&A: "We all think we know the story of the end of the First World War, and that story has been told in many brilliant ways, and I'm sure will continue to be told in many brilliant ways, but it's not been told from the female point of view before."

With regards to the show's historical authenticity, she said: "There is a difference between authenticity and truth, and what you need to do is tell the truth of the period, both visually in the stories and the text in your building of the world, but it doesn't necessarily have to be authentic.

"Because otherwise that becomes a thing, one, that we've seen before and that can be boring, and secondly, it become a thing that is there to kind of impress the audience, rather than welcome the audience in."

Meanwhile, director Shannon Murphy said that she felt it was "important to capture, rather than any sort of kind of documentary version of this, but to feel like we dropped cameras into that time period, and we could really feel the energy and the excitement of this new world that was at their fingertips".

She added that she calls the period drama genre "period-shmeriod", explaining: "I don't want to have arguments about door handles or whether someone would wear tights or not at the time. I'm like, if it looks great, we're doing it.

"We also would often talk about sort of the '70s fashion and how that was so kind of rebellious and playful. And we wanted to sort of ease a little bit of that into the look as well. So it's the Soho of our imagination."

Writer Warren explained of his and co-writer Stenham's process: "[Dope Girls: The Birth Of The British Drug Underground is] a non-fiction account of the time, of what was happening in Soho, and all the colourful characters that were there.

"And reading that book, we were inspired by some of those characters, but I guess our imaginations ran with it a little bit. Polly's a very old friend of mine, and we wanted to find something to work on together. And she had originally come across the Dope Girls book years before.

"And then when we decided to work on something together, given our background of nights in Soho, it seemed quite a fitting project. So we went to the National Archives, which is an extraordinary place out near Kew where you go and they give you gloves to go through all the old police records and leafing through old paper.

"And so that was amazing to read about some of the real people and what they got up to, and honestly, the things that they did make our world now seem so boring and kind of tame by comparison. More extreme things than we could ever even put in a BBC show."

Dope Girls will air on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from 9:15pm on Saturday 22nd February.

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