Off the record:
Kay Mellor (left) tells how a registry office provided the inspiration for her new TV series Love, Lies And Records.
A registry office provides the inspiration for a new TV drama.
Writer Kay Mellor had just registered her mum’s death when she came up with the idea for Vibe’s six-part British drama Love, Lies And Records.
Five days earlier she had been at a wedding and as she left that registry office she passed someone who had just registered a birth.
“I thought, ‘This is the absolute sharp end and hub of life’,” says Mellor, who also created the TV series The Syndicate, In The Club and Girlfriends.
Love, Lies & Records follows registrar Kate Dickinson (The Office’s Ashley Jensen) as she tries to juggle her personal life with the daily dramas of births, marriages, deaths and relationships.
At work she battles fellow registrar Judy (Rebecca Front) who is after her job while, on the home front, she becomes embroiled in her cop partner Rob’s investigation into fake marriages.
Mellor visited several registry offices while researching the series and says about 98 per cent of the stories are based on reality.
“When the idea first formed in my head to do Love, Lies And Records, I was thinking births, marriages, deaths, and what a rich seam that was,” she says, adding the drama quickly became much darker than originally planned.
“I began to hear the real stories that were coming through and I thought, ‘This is even more interesting, fascinating, because it sort of is the state of the nation and where we’re at today’.
“Looking at immigration, Brexit very much up in the air, feelings of people feeling displaced and not welcome, and then other people feeling that there were too many immigrants in our country – I’m never one to shy away from drama and I thought, ‘I have to go where it’s taking me’.
“I was talking to the registrars all this time and I thought, ‘I wouldn’t be a responsible writer if I daren’t go to those places’.”