Dope Girls review: This new BBC drama shows nobody knows anything, except how to make a female Peaky Blinders

He was referring to Hollywood executives, the men and women who presented themselves as box office sages but in reality floundered in the search for the next big hit, all too often relying on a reboot of the last big hit to bring in the bucks.

Watching Dope Girls (BBC1, Sat, 9.15pm), reminded me of Goldman's maxim.

Not knowing anything, and searching for the next small screen sensation, the Beeb commissioners seem to have allowed themselves to get take in by the elevator pitch.

“It's Peaky Blinders... but with women!”

Based – very loosely - on a non-fiction book called Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground, it tells the story of Kate Galloway (Julianne Nicholson), who falls on hard times at the end of the First World War, and resorts to nefarious measures to keep herself and daughter Evie (Eilidh Fisher) afloat.

A scribbled caption when we first meet Kate tells us “Dope deals 0, Robberies 0, Murders 0”, but by the time the episode ends, it's safe to say that Kate is well up on those numbers.

She has headed to London, where she bunks with Billie, a showgirl in a backstreet speak-easy, and their relationship status could currently be labelled 'murky'.

After that, Kate's life spirals rapidly into criminality, which barely seems to touch the sides.

From being a genteel country wife with a feckless husband hiding bankruptcy, her descent – or rise, depending on your point of view – to London underworld kingpin happens with a bewildering rapidity and without a backward glance.

Most of this comes from the driving force behind the drama, summed up in a scene where Kate goes to the country pub where she has been working while the landlord's been away at the front.

Despite having helped the landlady with her books, and keeping the place running during the war, the landlord's return means Kate is out of a job, but now her hubby has killed himself in shame at the bankruptcy, she's come asking for help.

“I need my job back,” Kate pleads.

“It's not exactly my decision,” the landlady complains, looking pointedly at her husband in the bar, barking orders.

Kate's having none of this: “So make it your decision!”

It's an over-riding theme, of this first episode at least, female agency – showing women can do what they want, when they want, how they want.

Billie's agency lies in being a bohemian free spirit, while we also meet Violet, who is bidding to become one of the first female officers in the Metropolitan Police.

She shows her agency by using her knowledge of a fellow recruit's 'inversion' to oust her from the recruits, before kicking a police instructor in the gentlemen's arrangements.

Unfortunately, the programme makers don't seem to have show similar agency, with the whole thing aping Peaky Blinders style, with the criminality, the post-First World War setting, the sudden outbreaks of violence.

It doesn't end there either, Dope Girls makes similarly anachronistic use of music, and the whole thing is shot as if the cameraman is engaged in a game of hide and seek with the actors, peeking out from behind armoires, glancing through curtains, and never – ever - staying still.

It's achingly, painfully post-modern, from breaking the fourth wall, to those scribbled captions to Kate's baptism and rebirth as a criminal goddess in the Trafalgar Square fountains.

It's so self-consciously hip that it becomes irritating. Even more so when you read about the real-life woman who inspired Dope Girls – Kate Meyrick.

A wife and mother, who ran nursing homes with her husband, she became a London nightclub owner when divorce left her penniless with eight children to support.

Constantly harassed by police, her clubs attracted the celebs of the time of the 'Bright Young Things', including Rudolph Valentino and Evelyn Waugh. Eventually, three of her daughters married into the nobility.

A story like that doesn't need the Peaky Blinders embellishments, the revisionist narrative, the post-modern tropes.

It just needs a story-teller – the type who does know something.