Maxine Peake and Lesley Sharp are to star in a new BBC1 drama based on the true story of the victims of the Rochdale sexual abuse scandal.
Peake, who has previously starred in Shameless and Silk on TV and Hamlet on stage, and Sharp, star of hit detective show Scott and Bailey, are to play two women who listen to the victims after years of them being ignored by the authorities.
Written by Nicole Taylor, responsible for The C Word starring Sheridan Smith, the three-part drama is produced by the team behind Five Daughters, the multi-award winning BBC drama about the murder of five women in Ipswich in 2006.
Nicole Taylor, writer, said: “Whatever I thought I knew about what had happened in Rochdale, I knew nothing until I met the girls and their families. Listening to them was the beginning of understanding – not just of the terrible suffering they experienced but of the courage it took to persist and persist over years, in telling authorities who didn’t want to know, and ultimately participate in the court proceedings that brought justice”.
The drama is made with the cooperation of the victims and their families.
Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor for the north-west and consultant on the drama, described the Rochdale case as “both groundbreaking and heartbreaking”.
The BBC said the drama would focus on the abuse of the girls and their betrayal by the system rather than whether the fact that the perpetrators were all Asian men played a part. “It’s about how these girls were let down by the system,” said a spokeswoman.
Charlotte Moore, controller of BBC TV Channels and iPlayer, said the drama was a result of the production team spending three years “talking to the girls unravelling the shocking scale of abuse, the horror of what they’ve been through and the enormous courage it’s taken for them to speak out.”
The three hour-long programmes, made by BBC Studios and independent producer Studio Lambert, also star Paul Kay, Lisa Reilly and Jill Halfpenny as parents of the girls, alongside Ace Bhatti as Nazir Afzal, former chief crown prosecutor for the north-west.
