You might not have heard of Dave Fishwick, but Bank of Dave – the Netflix biopic about the unlikely bank manager from Burnley – was one of the most Googled films of 2023. That same year it topped the streamer’s charts, and now a second installation is on Netflix.

Fishwick grew up with “nothing” and went on to establish a multi-million-pound series of businesses. Through his real-life Bank on Dave community bank in Burnley, Fishwick has helped thousands by offering loans with relatively low interest rates, alleviating financial misery for the worst off.

Fishwick has hundreds of stories, but the ones about the people who borrowed a few hundred out of desperation and have been hit with repayment plans spanning decades and spiralling into the thousands hit the hardest.

His message is simple: “I’m going after bad, bad people.”

He has won BAFTA and Royal Television Society awards for Bank of Dave, but there is more to Fishwick than worthiness: his instinct for catching fraudsters is addictive. He screws up his face whenever he talks about the latest scam, from phone thieves to get rich quick programmes and the scourge of payday loans. Millions are glued to his formula: a piece with ITV where he confronts a phone thief face-to-face was ITV News’ biggest story of the year.

Does he get a kick out of it? “I do,” admits Fishwick. “I’m from Burnley, I’m frightened of nothing and no one on the planet, and we will go after them.”

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“That’s the whole thing with payday loans,” he begins. “They pray on the poor and vulnerable, they’re terrible. The average person that borrows off me has a couple of hundred pounds in the bank. People are taking loans and threatening to kill themselves ‘cause they can’t afford to pay it back.”

Starring James Bond’s Rory Kinnear as Dave, Bank of Dave 2 is largely shot in Burnley, providing some much-needed on-screen representation to the north of England. As much as it is a tale about the people who are being unravelled by the very worst side of capitalism, it is a love story about the Lancashire town and its people, pubs and places.

Fishwick can’t say whether there’ll be a third Bank of Dave film, but I sense that if there were, it might tackle the ‘buy now pay later’ loans that seem to be his current grievance. Klarna just got slapped with a $46million fine, the biggest in history by regulators for breaking anti-money laundering laws.