In Defence of Dope Girls

which I've been watching despite the reviews...

I’d read a bit about the BBC 1 series Dope Girls before it started last Saturday (the whole series is available on iPlayer). I knew it was set in the demimonde of 1918 Soho and had a strong female cast. The era between the wars has fascinated me for years. If I could go back to any time or place in history, it would be to sit and eat daube with the Bloomsbury Group, to picnic with Daphne du Maurier or visit a London nightclub with DH Lawrence giving me fashion advice.

I also knew it was a production from Bad Wolf, the Cardiff based company that was created in 2015 by people who had worked with Russell T Davies on Dr Who and had subsequently produced His Dark Materials, I Hate Suzy and Industry. I wanted to watch it, so I did.

And then I read the reviews, which told me all the reasons why it was rubbish. The main reasons given tended to fall into three categories: 1) It was trying too hard to be like Peaky Blinders and failing; 2) the plot was so confusing that people gave up within the first 20 minutes; 3) it was yet another example of “woke” colourblind casting, with people of colour all over the damn place, which made it annoying and unhistorical.

For those of you who haven't yet dipped your toe in the murky Trafalgar Square fountain water of Dope Girls, here’s some context. It's loosely based on a non-fiction book published way back in 1992.

This tells the real life stories of those people who ruled the nightclub scene in London at the time, including Kate Meyrick, the so-called Queen of the Night, who came to London after separating from her husband and went on to run a series of hugely successful illegal nightclubs, continually rising like a phoenix from the ashes of arrest, imprisonment and closure, until her death at the age of 57. This article gives more information about her. She was by all accounts a fascinating and immensely resilient woman, who worked tirelessly to create a future for her eight children - here she is leaving court with two of them:

It’s also, incidentally, the source material for Kate Atkinson’s novel Shrines of Gaiety (not my favourite of her books, as, oddly, she didn't make me care enough about any of the characters).

Dope Girls the TV series uses these real life figures and creates the character Kate Galloway (Julianne Nicholson) who loses her job and her home after the war when her husband, unsuccessful in business deals, hangs himself. She travels to London with her teenage daughter Evie (Eilidh Fisher) and they end up staying with Billie (Umi Meyer), who, it turns out, is the daughter Kate had “out of wedlock” and gave up for adoption years ago. Entwined with their struggles to survive in post war Soho are the stories of Violet (Eliza Scanlen) who is escaping a loveless home up north and the violent death of her sister for a job with the police as one of the first female officers, and Isabella Salucci (the magnificent Geraldine James, who I last saw as Marilla in Anne With An E), the matriarch of the criminal kingpins the Saluccis.

So. Let's take the criticisms one at a time. Full disclaimer here - I have not seen all episodes of Peaky Blinders. There are some similarities - it's set in the same initial historical period, it’s about the criminal underworld, the filming is deliberately jarring at times. But what Dope Girls reminded me of more than anything, was Jez Butterworth’s trippy take on the Roman invasion of Britain, Britannia - look, it's even got the same grubby wings!

Like Britannia, what Dope Girls does is knowingly, deliberately, create a vibe. And if you lean into that vibe, layers of history repeating itself, patterns of human behaviour, begin to emerge.

The creators of Dope Girls have said that they could see, and used, links between post First World War fashion and decor and the 1970s, and between the drug fuelled nightclub scene of early 20th century Soho and 1990s rave culture, and they overtly make these links in the way the series is filmed. The dances that Billie creates at the club are part of the early artform of burlesque, but also have elements of 1970s go-go performance and traditional African dance. The scenes where people are partying look simultaneously like an acid house all-nighter and a tribal gathering. Basically it looks like someone took a beautiful, meticulously researched and delicately shot picnic scene from a Stephen Poliakoff drama from the same era and dragged all those beautiful white frocks through a muddy puddle. Because that’s the vibe. The bedraggled, seamy, glimmering underside (literally underground, in many scenes) of glamorous London life.

There is some outstanding and carefully chosen use of choral music in the soundtrack, where the lyrics add to the understanding of what's happening rather than just creating a mood, including mesmerizing versions of the Irish ballad Let No Man Steal Your Thyme, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, a trippy mashed up version of Jerusalem, and what sounds like some Russian Orthodox chant. Dope Girls is its own invention - not a cut price Peaky Blinders rip-off.

Secondly, I would argue that the plot is only confusing to those viewers who do not lean in to the aforementioned vibe (and who do not try and watch it while simultaneously on their phones). Plot and historical details are released subtly rather than given huge amounts of exposition. “When is my tutor coming back?” Evie’s moneyed London friend complains to her mother when she and Evie have to do their revision alone. “I don’t know - when he stops being ill,” her mother says distractedly, in a subtle nod to the Spanish flu epidemic that decimated the post war generation. The first episode is deliberately disjointed, to create the sense of Kate’s life being upended not only by her husband's death but by the end of the war, meaning that the job she loves, and is good at, will disappear, because the men are coming home. It is a series with a slow burn, that opens up and becomes more coherent with each episode. When I watched the last one yesterday evening, I went back and watched the first episode again, for the satisfaction of seeing how far the characters had come and to make sense of those initial disjointed scenes.

What unites all the female characters in Dope Girls is hunger. Kate is hungry for security, particularly for her younger daughter's future (she's been told by the teachers that Evie is unusually bright and “university material”). Kate also has a sensual appetite - despite the steamy, debauched nature of the programme, there is actually very little sexual contact depicted, but when it is with Kate, both times she is the one who initiates it. Evie is hungry for knowledge, both academic and, in the wake of her father’s death, for what happens in the afterlife. Billie is hungry for fame, or at least notoriety, to replace the love she never found in her childhood. Mama Salucci is hungry for revenge, and has been ever since she was a small child, with that hunger literally running to a taste for human flesh. And Violet, one of the most interesting and unpredictable characters, has a hunger for life itself, manifested in the way she voraciously tears into any food she’s given as if she may never see another meal. All these types of hunger would have been seen at the time as unladylike, unacceptable and even taboo for a woman to indulge. Some still are.

To assuage that hunger, all these women will lie and cheat and steal and betray, repeatedly. But none of this is done gratuitously. All of the people depicted have known and lost love in their lives, even the (peripheral) male characters. No-one is wholly irredeemable. There is no black and white, only multiple shades of grey. And this makes the series immensely watchable.

Finally, the “colourblind casting” accusations, which were particularly vehement on Reddit. Now, I am as irritated as the next person by the appearance of Asian doctors or cheery Afro-Caribbean vicars in otherwise 1930s set Agatha Christie-esque crime dramas (and don't even get me started on the mediaeval English black bishop in Shardlake). However, this is Soho we're talking about. London's always been a melting pot, and, much to the disbelief of Reddit posters, there were well known musicians, dancers and drug dealers of colour in that era. I grant you, the aspiring female police officers are a little too optimistic in their profiling (I looked it up - the first female Asian police officer wasn't appointed until 1971), but other than that, Dope Girls pretty much gets it spot on. And, unlike consciously colour-neutral shows where a character’s background or appearance isn’t ever commented on, it doesn't shy away from themes of racism either. “But she’s half-caste!” exclaims Evie on discovering that Billie is her half-sister. The scene where Billie auditions for the part of Cleopatra in an upcoming film, surrounded by twittering English rose style ballet dancers who “other” her with their looks and body language, is deliberately excruciating.

In short, I would urge you to ignore the critics, lean into the vibe and enjoy. I certainly did. I really hope it gets the viewing figures that will secure it a second series. As Kate says in the final episode, “I’ve only just begun.”