Kay Mellor

Kay Mellor was a prolific writer whose work found drama in everyday lives and gave voice to the untold stories of women in a society that paid only lip service to notions of recognition, respect and equality. She did so with an unblinking honesty and a gift for finding comedy within the mundane that won her a loyal legion of television viewers with hit shows such as Band of Gold, Fat Friends and The Syndicate.

Mellor’s work zeroed in on the everyday and the commonplace but probed beneath its surface to reveal a rich emotional hinterland. This was occupied by characters influenced by her upbringing with a violent-then-absentee father on a Leeds council estate, her mother’s subsequent second marriage when Mellor was nine, and her pregnancy and marriage at the age of 16.

Her ambition to be an actor was delayed by raising two children. In her late twenties, Mellor took her O and A-levels as a mature student before studying drama at Bretton Hall College, where she began to write.

From the start, her writing was issue-led, but it was her focus on her characters and her sympathetic treatment of them that saw her work connect directly and deeply with audiences. 

Her first play, Paul, about a disabled boy, was nominated in the National Student Drama Festival. Her second, Climbing Out, about a couple with marriage difficulties, was toured by the Yorkshire Theatre Company, which she co-founded, and was seen in London at the Finborough Arms in 1986, where The Stage described it as “rather lugubriously humorous”. 

While acting in ITV’s short-lived Albion Market, Mellor wrote a script for it that earned her the attention of Coronation Street producer Bill Podmore. He duly appointed her as the flagship soap’s newly created script associate.

Her first standalone work for TV was 1988’s Prix Italia-nominated A Place of Safety, which explored the effect of child-abuse accusations on a family. The following year, she wrote an episode for Channel 4’s Brookside and co-created the pioneering Children’s Ward with Paul Abbott, whom she had met on Coronation Street. Boldly extending the boundaries of what a series aimed at children could engage with, in 1997 it earned a BAFTA Children’s Award for best drama.  

The 1990s saw Mellor’s television profile exponentially grow, with the daytime Anglo-Australian saga Families, the children’s series Just Us and an adaptation of Jane Eyre (in both of which she also appeared). 

It also saw her return to the theatre, A Place of Safety prompting 1991’s In All Innocence at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in her native Leeds. She followed it in 1992 with her most successful stage play, A Passionate Woman. Based on her mother’s long-secret affair, it transferred to London’s Comedy Theatre, starring Stephanie Cole and directed by Ned Sherrin, in 1994. It later found its way onto television with Billie Piper and Sue Johnston in 2010.

Her breakthrough into mainstream attention came with 1995’s Band of Gold, a controversial portrait of Bradford sex workers, starring Geraldine James, Cathy Tyson, Barbara Dickson and Samantha Morton (who also played Mellor’s Jane Eyre two years earlier).

She followed it with the women’s football drama Playing the Field, which ran for five seasons from 1998. One-off television film Gifted, in 2003, shifted the focus to the privileged assumptions of male football and a claim of rape against a rising star centre forward.

In 2000, she set up her own Leeds-based company Rollem Productions. One of its earliest successes was Mellor’s most popular creation, the BAFTA-nominated Fat Friends. A warts-and-all portrait of members of a slimming group, it introduced future Gavin and Stacey creators James Corden (spotted by Mellor in an advert for Tango) and Ruth Jones. It ran for five years from 2000, with a musical version, composed by Nick Lloyd Webber, first seen in 2017. A mooted tour earlier this year starring Lee Mead was scuppered by the Covid pandemic.

In 2012, Mellor tapped into the zeitgeist again with The Syndicate, its four series exploring the effects of a jackpot lottery win on its unlucky-in-luck winners. Its admirers included the director Steven Spielberg, who reworked it for American television as Lucky 7, although it didn’t get beyond its first season. Immune to the lure of Hollywood, she turned down further overtures.  

In the Club, a 2014 drama about the lives of newly expectant parents who meet at antenatal classes, and 2017’s Love, Lies and Records, centred around a registry office, was followed by her swansong, Girlfriends, starring Zoë Wanamaker, Miranda Richardson and Phyllis Logan.

Her few ventures into film saw her producing scripts for Girls’ Night (1998) and Fanny and Elvis (1999), which she also directed.

Among her many accolades were BAFTA’s Dennis Potter Award in 1998, recognition from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain for her “outstanding contribution to writing” in 2015, and the fellowship of the Royal Television Society the following year. 

The subject of ITV’s This Is Your Life and BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, she was awarded an OBE in 2009.

Kay Mellor was born on May 11, 1951, and died on May 15, aged 71. She is survived by her husband and two daughters: actor Gaynor Faye and television producer Yvonne Francas.