Margate, on the UK’s Kent coast, is one of Britain’s rundown towns that’s on the up. It has a vibrant arts scene and a new wave of young mover-inners, but there are still condoms in the Lido, if you care to look. Now, Margate’s been immortalised in the TV show Dreamland, where the title should come with a question mark: to some, this Margate is utopia, a safe, sunny haven from the outside world. To others, it is purgatory, inescapable, a dead end that should have been closed down years ago.

Lily Allen, the star of Dreamland, is in the former camp. “Margate’s steeped in summertime history,” she says. “I had just moved to New York [with husband David Harbour], but I bring my kids back to the UK for summer to spend time with their dad, so when this landed on my desk, and I heard it was shooting in Margate, I was instantly hooked.”

It helped that Dreamland is produced by Sharon Horgan (Bad Sisters, Catastrophe), and evolved from an excellent 2017 short that comedy’s current queen bee had written. That short, Summer, which starred Morgana Robinson in the role Allen now takes, was about a woman who attends her sister’s baby shower while secretly pregnant herself. Set in Margate, it was tear-the-plaster-off comedy, chaotic and filthy and full of festering family secrets.

It set Sharon Horgan on her way to global success, laying a template for a series of comic-dramatic analyses of female relationships that Horgan describes as: “Not feeling scared to look at stuff that isn’t … cosy. But looking at it in a way that doesn’t put people off. When I turn on the TV I want to escape, but I’m most comforted when I see a character and recognise that they’re going through something that makes me feel a bit better about my terrible choices!”

Although Horgan isn’t a writer on Dreamland (an all-female writer’s room of Gabby Best, Sarah Kendall, Emma Jane Unsworth and Sharma Walfall take scripting duties), she is an executive producer and her hallmarks are all over it: Mel, played by Allen, is the embodiment of the kind of terrible choices that inspire both empathy and embarrassment.

“She went to Paris to go and work in fashion and messed up very badly,” says Allen. “Then she finds herself back in Margate, but she’s very resentful about it. She doesn’t want to be there at all and there’s lots of eye-rolling.”

The eye-rolling is generally directed at her sisters – Trish (Freema Agyeman), the core of the family unit with two kids and another on the way; frustrated local journalist Clare (Gabby Best); and happy-go-lucky Leila (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) — and Mum Cheryl (Frances Barber), who has just embarked on her first gay love affair. This being a Sharon Horgan-produced show, the various family secrets tend to explode like boils in scenes of bleak farce and jet-black comedy. Dreamland is an exploration of multi-generational female relationships, and massively dysfunctional family dynamics, all set by the seaside.

Lily Allen doesn’t sing, not once. Instead, she joins the ranks of solo pop stars moving in to acting, following Billie Piper, Madonna and Lady Gaga. Dreamland is her first TV role, following a successful debut on the London stage in late 2021 with the play 2.22: A Ghost Story.