The Gallows Pole: Shane Meadows does period drama - with an office worker and mechanic

Director Shane Meadows has made his first period drama, about a little-known 18th Century criminal mastermind. The cast includes established and first-time actors, from a mechanic to a financial manager.

Stevie Binns says her friends had a long-running joke about her broad accent. So when they saw a social media post looking for people with Yorkshire accents to be in a new TV drama, they tagged her.

"I think it was a bit of a sly dig from my friend," she says with a smile.

Binns, from Halifax, is a team leader in the financial industry and had never considered acting. "I'd done a grand total of nothing at all."

While she may have been sent the advert as a bit of a joke, she decided to give it a go.

"I thought, why not? It was Covid time and I'd been stuck in the house with my cat for a very long time. So I thought I'd try something different, and I sent off a tape."

She's had the last laugh. Her audition tape earned her a role in Meadows' The Gallows Pole, which is set in West Yorkshire in the 1760s and starts on BBC Two this week.

Meadows, the acclaimed director behind This Is England and The Virtues, is known for casting newcomers alongside established names and regular collaborators.

When the open casting call for The Gallows Pole went out in 2021, he and casting director Shaheen Baig were overwhelmed. Meadows says he watched more than 5,000 tapes himself.

"Certain people leap out and you pull them in," he says.

Binns was one. Charlotte Ockelton was another. She opened a hair salon two months before Covid but was forced to close it and lost her house, and her daughter had to go and live with her father.

Ockelton sent in a tape while sofa surfing and trying to get back on her feet. "Without Shane giving me a chance along with everyone else on that production, I would still have that debt lingering over me," she says.

In his tape, Dave Perkins explained that he was a mechanic from Dronfield, near Sheffield, who had been a semi-professional boxer, a Gary Barlow tribute singer and a model.

"I'd never heard an opening line like it," Meadows says. "I was like, 'You're coming down. I've no idea what's going to land, but wow.' And he looked like Tom Hardy. It was like something God had created."

Perkins was in, too. Unlike Binns, he had harboured aspirations to act, but had never got a break.

"It's very overwhelming at first to go from standing in a garage on your own covered in oil fixing people's cars to being stood there with five cameras pointed in your face and Shane Meadows next to you telling you what to do," he says.

"And people that you've grown up watching like Thomas Turgoose, Michael Socha, Adam Fogerty, Sophie McShera - you're looking at all them around you and thinking, what am I doing here?"

The Gallows Pole is effectively a prequel to Benjamin Myers' award-winning book about "King" David Hartley, who led an audacious large-scale currency racket by clipping the edges off gold coins and melting down the trimmings to make new money.

"As a crime, it's so huge," Meadows says. "Pound for pound, if not the biggest, [it was] one of the biggest crimes ever committed.

"This is an incredible story and it's something that I didn't know about."

However, Meadows was "quite nervous" about making his first period drama - or his first to take place before This Is England's setting of 1983.

"I did have a fear about, am I going to get chewed up by a great big frilly blouse and a horse cart, and spat out at the other end?" the director laughs.

But The Gallows Pole is a long way from the rarefied world of aristocrats in frilly blouses and bonnets, and retains the working-class realism of Meadows' other work.

"I still suffer with impostor syndrome a little bit, so it was quite out of my comfort zone," he admits. "But the characters weren't, and the story wasn't."

In the show, King David (Socha) and wife Grace (McShera) are portrayed as embarking on the fraud to support their rural community as it is threatened by the arrival of the industrial revolution.

The Hartleys were a feared family gang but had the community's interests at heart, according to one of their descendants.

Steve Hartley, a five-times great grandson of David and Grace, says some older family members were reluctant to discuss the story when he was growing up.

"What happened, at the end of the day, was criminal. The older generations probably didn't want to celebrate that.

"In more recent times, because the story is a little bit more distant, people have probably been more enthusiastic about discussing it," says Hartley, who has just published The Yorkshire Coiners, about King David's scam.

"There's probably a feeling these days that he was trying to do a little bit of good for the community.

"And that's the way I like to look at it. I think he could be more a Robin Hood than a Dick Turpin. He's robbing from the rich to help the poor, rather than just taking all the money for himself."

So it's the story of a folk hero leading a real historical gang near Hebden Bridge. Robin Hood meets Peaky Blinders in Happy Valley.

Perkins plays another family member, Tom Hartley; Ockelton plays Grace's sister Gwen; and Binns plays Mand, one of their close-knit group of associates.

The actors followed Meadows' usual method of developing the characters over months of workshops, before improvising most of the dialogue without a script.

Although some were new to acting, they were prepared by the time the cameras rolled, Binns says.

"Because of the journey that Shane's taking you on ahead of filming, it comes really naturally [to improvise] because you've lived and breathed this character for months ahead of filming," she explains.

That didn't lessen her excitement on the first day on set. "I had loads of questions and I wanted to look at everything and press all the buttons and touch all the stuff that you're not allowed to touch," Binns says.

"It was probably one of the most exciting things that I've ever done, but I did I want to touch everything. I was like a small child."

Now the acting bug has bitten, does she want to do more?

"Yes," is the immediate reply.

"Yes. I think it's a brilliant thing, and a pretty magical thing, when you get to a point in your life when you've been exposed to something that you've fallen in love with that you didn't know existed for you or was an option for you. So yeah, definitely."

The Gallows Pole is on BBC Two and iPlayer from Wednesday, 31 May.