A MAJOR new television drama set in the Dales of the 1870s is set to shine a spotlight on little-known aspects of the area's history.

And the producers of ITV's Jericho - the first episode is aired tonight at 9pm - will no doubt be hoping that it emulates the runaway success of another of the channel's recent historical dramas, Downtown Abbey.

Not that there are many similarities in content - Jericho has already been described as the closest thing Britain has ever done to a western, with its stories of settlers and outcasts in a 'frontier town'. If it's successful, the show could run for at least five series.

Jericho is based on the community which came together to build the Ribblehead rail viaduct, which would have been a mammoth undertaking at any time, but, 150 years ago, was a hugely labour-intensive project.

Having hundreds of otherwise disparate people drawn together in one place has given the writers of the eight-part series plenty of scope for some juicy plotting.

Jericho has been created by Steve Thompson, who has written for episodes for both Sherlock and Doctor Who.

He was inspired, he says, by the classic 1950s western Shane, starring Alan Ladd, which depicted the struggles of a former gunfighter trying to settle down but becoming caught up in a bitter dispute over land.

There is not much gun-slinging action in Jericho - but it does chart the gritty and sometimes brutal realities of life in a shanty town, sprung up to service the needs of itinerant workers.

Steve Thompson says: "It is, I suppose, like a British western. The western is a very broad church because we have seen some very violent westerns, like those by Sam Peckinpah, but also Little House on the Prairie is a western too. So that is quite a wide spectrum.

“I was inspired by westerns like Shane, which are not about cowboys - they are about settlers and the people, specifically about the woman being central to that and the family’s life.

"For me what is exciting is that I have never seen a British western or a British frontier story.

"It was inspired by a true story. Jericho was a real place. It was a little shanty town in the shadow of the Ribblehead Viaduct. Shanty towns tended to be named after famous battles or biblical places. Jericho was the one at Ribblehead so we chose it for the name of the series.

“These little shanty towns started to appear when they were building the railways across Yorkshire in the 1870s. These places were like wild west towns. So the idea of making a British Western was new and exciting to me.

“We’ve called it the Culverdale Viaduct, but it is based on Ribblehead. The very first thing we did was go and visit Ribblehead and stand there and look up at this extraordinary structure. You can still see the foundations of where the huts were built.

"They finished building after seven years and just picked up the huts and moved to another location. These rather nomadic towns existed for a short time and then because they were all made out of wood they dismantled them and took them elsewhere. The industrial revolution created the world we live in now."

The series features some top acting talent, especially in the key roles. Clarke Peters, so superb in the long-running The Wire, stars as Ralph Coates (presumably nothing to do with the 1970s Burnley footballer of the same name!), a rough and ready self-styled 'railway agent', while Jessica Raine, of Call the Midwife and Wolf Hall, plays the impoverished widow and boarding-house proprietor Annie Quaintain, and Hans Matheson, of The Tudors, is navvy Johnny Jackson.

Peters says he wanted to play the character - a black American in Britain soon after the US Civil War - partly because it was historically accurate.

He says: "We took a look at the first couple of scripts and I contacted Steve Thompson to see if an African-American in England in the 1870s was credible. Also whether there was enough factual information to develop a character. It turned out there was.

"Before the Civil War there were more African-Americans here than post-Civil War. And a lot of them did work in the north, in agriculture, weaving and in factories. We spoke at length to an expert at Manchester University about the historical connections.”

Jessica Raine, too, says she was attracted to her part because of the way it was written.

"She is a schoolmaster’s widow. But her husband was a gambler and the family proved to be in massive debt, leaving her with nothing when he dies. So we meet her at this crucial ‘sink or swim’ moment in her life. I found Annie inspirational from the start…surviving, just. Determined, headstrong, resourceful, vulnerable. Most of the research I could get my hands on was very much from the male perspective, about the navvies and the building of the viaducts, the awful sacrifice a lot of men made to building it. All incredibly interesting, but it made me keen to show the female perspective truthfully from this time.”