The BBC’s new drama, Dope Girls, comes with a lot of hype. It’s set at the start of the Roaring Twenties. It features an all-female lead cast. And, even better, it’s about the criminal underworld of Soho’s nightclubs. In the centre of it all is the mascara-streaked face of Umi Myers.
She plays Billie, a dancer at one of those clubs — and when she arrives to speak to me, she’s keen to highlight just how groundbreaking the show is.“My understanding of women of that time was, ‘Oh yeah, of course they went to work in the factories when men went away [to war]’,” Myers says, but Dope Girls tells a different story, loosely based on Kate Meyrick, a woman who rose from obscurity to become a nightclub owner in Soho.
