Teenage mother went on to become celebrated writer of gritty TV dramas
Kay Mellor, who has died aged 71, became a highly successful television scriptwriter after an inauspicious start as a teenage mother in the 1960s. She was behind the drama Fat Friends, set in a Leeds slimming club; the lottery series The Syndicate, starring Timothy Spall in the first season and Neil Morrissey in the fourth; and In the Club, following the widely differing lives of six couples attending parenting classes during their pregnancies.
She placed strong, believable female characters in the foreground – ‘‘what she does best . . . brassy northern women’’, as James Walton put it in the Telegraph. Many of her scripts were set in the gritty reality of
Yorkshire life, rather than the sunny nostalgia of shows such as
Last of the Summer Wine. Band of Gold, which ran for three series from 1995, dealt with prostitutes battling with pimps, police, debt and drugs along Lumb Lane in Bradford’s red-light district.
Kay Mellor’s interest in the subject had been sparked one November night in the 1980s when she was driving through the area to a party with her husband, Anthony. A blonde girl in a mini-skirt and crop top, her legs blue from the cold, bobbed down to look in the car, hoping that Anthony was a punter. ‘‘When I saw her face, I was shocked,’’ Kay Mellor recalled. ‘‘She looked about 14 . . . I kept thinking, ‘Whose daughter is this? What kind of a society do we live in where children of 13 or 14 have to sell their bodies?’ ’’
It was another urban car journey that gave Mellor the inspiration for Fat Friends, starring Alison Steadman. Driving in Leeds on a freezing night, she noticed a group that included a curvy young woman wearing a strappy dress, looking like a character from a Beryl Cook painting.
‘‘Even though I couldn’t hear what she was saying, I could tell she was spreading sunshine,’’ she said, recalling that almost everyone she knew was either on a diet or unhappy with their body shape. ‘‘I thought, ‘Why can’t you be happy with how you are?’ ’’ At its height, Fat Friends attracted 10 million viewers and in 2018 was turned into a musical.
She also wrote the screenplay for films including Girls’ Night (1998), starring Julie Walters and Brenda Blethyn in a bittersweet tale of a woman with breast cancer, and Fanny and Elvis (1999), a romantic comedy centred on a woman whose biological clock is ticking loudly. Girlfriends, one of her last projects, was about three women, friends since their teens, now facing menopause.
Mellor’s work flipped briskly between tears and laughter. ‘‘Life’s like that,’’ she told The Guardian in 1999. ‘‘You’re passionately in love with someone, they leave, so you chase them down the ring road in your nightie. It’s tragic, but it’s funny.’’
In the Club, which ran from 2014-16,
‘‘I thought my life had ended, that I would never do anything again except push a pram.’’
Kay Mellor on becoming pregnant at 16
presented viewers with a mid-40s businesswoman with two grown-up children who is pregnant by her young lover; a lesbian couple with a treacherous sperm donor; a young woman in an arranged marriage expecting a child who is not necessarily her husband’s; a father-to-be who has turned to crime after losing his job; and Rosie, 16, who has not told her widowed father she is pregnant.
If Rosie’s story seemed especially poignant, it was perhaps because almost 50 years earlier her creator had been in a similar situation. Kay Mellor was born Kay Daniel in Leeds, the second of three children of George Daniel and his wife, Dinah, who divorced her violent husband when Kay was 2. Dinah brought up her children alone in a ‘‘damp and horrible’’ prefab, as Mellor recalled, on a council estate. ‘‘She didn’t care what people thought. She wouldn’t wear a wedding ring and wouldn’t take state benefits. She worked as a tailoress. She did everything: making carpets for our rooms, wallpapering, cooking, sewing, and had time to read us stories and be affectionate.’’ The young Kay would make up stories to entertain her dolls. ‘‘My mother was Jewish, my father was Catholic,’’ she said. ‘‘I’ve never been to a synagogue but I had people coming up to me and saying, ‘You’re Jewish.’ I didn’t even know what that meant. I still feel I don’t belong anywhere.’’
By 16 she was pregnant: the father was Anthony, then 17, an apprentice motorcycle mechanic she met on a blind date. They married in 1967 with a reception at the Co-op that she described as like something from an Alan Bennett play: ‘‘I thought my life had ended, that I would never do anything again except push a pram.’’ Her mother stood by her, but made her promise she would resume her education.
Anthony’s parents squeezed the young couple and their baby daughter into their own council house and for two years they slept in a single bed with a cot alongside. In time they moved into their own council house and had a second daughter.
After her girls started school Kay Mellor kept her promise and went back to studying. Aged 27 she was studying drama at Bretton Hall College, near Wakefield, where she caught lectures by the sculptor Henry Moore and co-founded the Yorkshire Theatre Company. When Anthony also returned to college, she looked for acting work to pay the bills, landing a part in a mid-1980s soap opera Albion Market. Unimpressed by the storylines, she wrote her own script, and offered it to the producer. She ended up writing her own exit from the series.
After Albion Market closed, she worked on Coronation Street and Brookside, before writing Band of Gold. She also had a parallel career as an actor, appearing in her own adaptation of Jane Eyre (1997) and A Good Thief (2002). She continued to live in Leeds, but moved up from council houses to a large grey stone home in Headingley.
In 1997 she received Bafta’s Dennis Potter Award for outstanding writing for television and in 2009 was appointed OBE. She is survived by her husband, Anthony, who ran a daycare centre, and their two daughters, Yvonne Francas, an actor and television producer, and Gaynor Faye, an actor who played Judy Mallett in Coronation Street and was later in Emmerdale. – Telegraph Group