Blondes as bold as brass

A warm Thursday night at Brasingamen s in Alderley Edge and all eyes are on, well, everyone. The Braz, as it's known, is the local social focus, and tonight, as ever, the tables outside the club are fun-packed with highly polished, heavily tanned men and women, checking each other out over cocktail glasses and tiddly portions of fi sh and chips. The early evening sun glints on car roofs, bounces off bald pates and casts shadows in credit-card cleavages. The Cheshire set is showing out.

A group of young men cheer when three women arrive in a convertible Mini Cooper. Other females sniff : it's not much of a ride. There are Porsches and Ferraris lying low among the Beemers, Mercs and 4x4s. An SUV pulls up and a dark-haired minx in shirt, braces and teeny-tiny shorts spills out on to the gravel.

'Ow. Bloody heels. I wore these shorts for you, y'know. Batty riders!' Jaime Winstone, 21, pulls herself up and wiggles over to our table like the naughtiest schoolgirl alive. Kelly Harrison, 27, follows, blond and coltish in Vivienne Westwood vest and flippy skirt. Nichola Burley, 20, is already here, sitting pretty in jeans and off -the-shoulder top. The trio of actresses are by far the most attractive women in the bar. Their arrival sends ripples across the terrace. Older women would frown, if they hadn't Botoxed out the option. The girls, however, are blithely oblivious. 'Are we having pink champagne?' asks Nichola. Their PR nods, faintly, as his three charges whoop and dance in their seats.

Kelly, Nichola and Jaime are three of the cast of Goldplated, Channel 4's new drama about the North-West nouveau riche that begins in October. Some of us are very excited. Goldplated is set slap-bang in the centre of where I grew up. It tells the story of John White (David Schofield), a self-made millionaire, and his family. White made his fortune in the construction industry but his empire topples when his mistress, Cassidy, played by Kelly, gets pregnant. White leaves his wife, Beth (Barbara Marten), and moves Cassidy into his home, where she has to deal with his offspring, Darren, Justin and wayward Lauren (Jaime).

Though the setting may conjure up a northern Footballers' Wives, the show is more like a cross between Brass and Dallas: it has the latter's hard glitter and none of the characters is entirely likeable. Plus, a la Dallas, it's an action-packed hoot: the first episode features bitch-fights at a christening, rough stuff on the golfcourse and Lauren and Justin caught by Cassidy taking coke in their baby brother's bedroom: 'I think we spilt his talc!'

When I meet some of Goldplated's directors and producers they're all keen to distance the show from Footballers' Wives: 'That was a subculture, this is a complete culture,' says Simon Heath, executive producer. 'We're trying to dig deeper - Goldplated is funnier and sadder and everything's more precarious. People have jumped up a social class and they can easily fall back down to where they came from.'

To emphasise this surface impermanence, 'none of thehouses has a book or a DVD in there,' says John Chapman, the producer. 'You feel as though they could move out tomorrow. Does anyone really live here?' The d ecor does have that MTV Cribs feel; where home looks and feels like a hotel. It's the perfect glossy backdrop to the cars and OTT outfi ts: 'You know what?' says the wardrobe girl. 'We mostly got them from TK Maxx.'

The idea for Goldplated came when writer Jimmy Gardner, who worked on World Productions' Cops and Buried, went for a night out with those shows' actors. They took him to Cheshire. Gardner couldn't believe what he saw: the cars, the hair, the teeth-gritted desperation. So he did some research, interviewing local PRs, sports agents, event managers, people on the scene. Some of what he discovered is used verbatim, such as a scene in the first episode where Cassidy takes an old acquaintance, Donna (played by Nichola),to a local nightclub, Kudos (played by, yes, Brasingamens). She explains how you spot a man with money. It's through his shoes ('handmade, nothing you can buy off the rack'), wallet ('real quality, soft leather') and watch ('Cartier or Frank Mueller'), apparently. 'You aren't going to get one of them on QVC,' says Cassidy, drily.

The social laws that bind the Cheshire set are multitudinous and shatter-proof. In Goldplated we are kept updated on them by the Blondes, three women who, like Macbeth's witches, see all and speak the truth about what they see. 'They're the embodiment of the scene,' says Simon Heath. 'It's the women who make all the rules. They let the men think they run things but they're the ones with the massive social influence.'

Back in Brasingamens, the girls are far from running out of steam. Nichola recalls a holiday she had 'when I was young'. The PR and I exchange dinosaur glances. 'We met these lads who turned out to be that So Solid Crew,' she says. 'They were asking us back for a party and we ended up going skinny-dipping with them! It was hilarious! Nothing bad happened, though,' she demurs. 'I wouldn't want my mum thinking that. I love my mum. I'm dead close to my family.'

Jaime, the daughter of Ray Winstone, might be one of Goldplated's few nonnortherners but she understands where the show comes from, partly because her mum grew up in Reddish, Stockport, but also because the Winstones lived on a north London housing estate until Ray made some money and they moved to Essex. 'I know where my roots are,' says Jaime. 'But girls like Lauren don't. Brought up in a fuck-off mansion, they're surrounded by money, this fluffed-up pink picture of family, but they're lost really. She doesn't respect money 'cos she's always had it. She ends up in the Priory when all she wants is a cuddle ...'

Time for some pictures. The photographer, a little nervously, moves us into the ladies', where the girls pose with makeup in front of the mirror, until Kelly uses her lippy to add something XXXtra large to a framed poster of a discreetly naked man: 'That's better! That's what we need!' Jaime and Lauren fall about, literally in the case of Jaime , who's still having trouble with her Marc Jacobs heels. Presently we're ushered into the main bar to a low table in front of the 'entertainment': a chunky chap performing his own karaoke. He presses buttons and the backing track to 'Mack The Knife' begins. Kelly and Jaime spring to their feet for a dramatic tango as every man in the room drools and every woman looks hard into her drink for some sustenance.

Afterwards Kelly tells me she was never as wild as Jaime and Nichola when she 'was their age'. I am beginning to feel prehistoric. Of course, in this environment, I am: the problem being I look my age, not having maintained my youthful glow through anything more elaborate than hair dye and soap and water. Plus, I can remember this club when it was called the Queensgate, 20 years ago. When the PR told Brasingamens' manager this before we arrived, he goggled: 'Oh my God, how old is she?' I'm 39. Clearly, I must kill you now you know the truth. That, or commit hara-kiri with a collagen needle.

Enough of all that: Gabriel Heinze, Manchester United's Argentinian left back, has just walked in! I am speechless but the girls don't know who he is. 'Which one?' asks Jaime. 'Yeah, he's fit. Go over and tell him you like him. Or I will!' Luckily Mr Heinze lasts for only one song before departing.

If you spent your formative years, as I did, in Wilmslow, a few short miles from Brasingamens, there is much of Goldplated that chimes. Even in the Seventies and Eighties, this place was flash. The labels were diff erent - Matinique instead of D&G - and the car was a soft-top Golf, or a Jaguar XJS, but all were paraded with the same ostentation. The area has been working class-made-good for many years now, and is extraordinarily proud of it.

It's easy to laugh at Cheshire's showiness, its unclassy desire to show you the money, but, to me, its people and ideals are far less off ensive than those who look down at anyone with the wrong accent no matter how well they've done. Cheshire women work as well as play, running interior decoration businesses or introduction agencies, managing boutiques or bars. And, Christ in a convertible, they slave at looking good. It's full hair and slap just to put out the bins.

You could call Goldplated, and Cheshire, the fulfi lment of Thatcher's classless dream; anyone can make it, if they work hard enough. But I remember the early 1990s, when this area, like the rest of the UK, was hit by recession. A bypass was built, sweeping traffic past Wilmslow's chi-chi dress shops, overtaking its department store, Finnigans. Wilmslow began, slowly, to wither away, its furriers closing, its shoe stores selling up, to be replaced by charity shops.

With typical vigour, it picked itself up and started again. By 1997 it had become a place to go out; bristling with wine bars, restaurants, night clubs, even a lap-dancing club. Now, Wilmslow, Alderley, Hale, Bowden and country cousin Prestbury are as covetable as Knightsbridge or the Cotswolds. Excellent schools, fabulous shopping, see-and-be-seen niteries, celebs a-go-go, whether from football or Coronation Street. And now its own drama series. Cheshire's moment has arrived. Just make sure you've got the stamina and credit rating to make its solid gold grade.