Tuesday 17 May 2022 10:46 PM The woman who turned her life into TV gold: How Kay Mellor had experience of so ... trends now
Screenwriter Kay Mellor has died suddenly aged 71. She wrote a succession of acclaimed shows, such as Fat Friends, which launched the careers of James Corden and Ruth Jones
Kay Mellor was unafraid to take any secret from her own life, no matter how private, and transform it into compelling drama.
With her wild and ruthless imagination, the screenwriter behind The Syndicate and Band Of Gold — who has died suddenly aged 71 — used her teenage pregnancy, rocky marriage, money worries and struggles with her weight as inspiration for her sensational TV series.
Her breakthrough came from the most scandalous story of all: her mother’s shocking admission of a desperate love affair before Kay was born.
It was all fuel for a succession of highly acclaimed shows, such as Fat Friends, which launched the careers of James Corden and Ruth Jones.
Kay’s speciality was the ensemble drama, where we meet a collection of characters with criss-crossing lives, plunged into a high-tension dilemma before hidden problems are forced to the surface.
Though she was not afraid to turn down Hollywood offers in order to retain control of her work, her scripts became so successful that she enjoyed a millionaire lifestyle, flying around the world and rubbing shoulders with international stars — sometimes to the bewilderment of her husband Anthony, who was an apprentice motor mechanic when she married him aged 16.
Her back catalogue reads like a list of some of the best of British television over the past 25 years.
Fat Friends followed cemented Mellor's reputation as an unequalled writer of dramas with multiple plotlines
The actress and later screenwriter was not afraid to turn down Hollywood offers in order to retain control of her work
Families, the soap opera set in Australia and Cheshire, which ran for 320 episodes from 1990 to 1993, gave Jude Law his break with a recurring screen role, and helped launch the writing career of Doctor Who’s Russell T Davies.
The Mail described it as ‘a blend of suburban Crossroads and glamorous Baywatch’.
Her shows were certain to star women as strong characters, including Siobhan Finneran and Alison Steadman in The Syndicate, Ashley Jensen and Rebecca Front in Love, Lies And Records, and Cathy Tyson and Geraldine James in Band Of Gold.
An actress herself, Kay starred too in the family drama Just Us in the early 1990s and appeared as Mrs Cooper in her own adaptation of Jane Eyre in 1997.
It was an improbable career for a girl born Kay Daniel in 1951, who grew up in poverty with her single mother in Leeds.
‘Home was a rambling Victorian house that was sub-divided into a warren of mean, two-room flats, with a row of shared lavatories outside,’ she remembered. ‘Dad had been injured in the war.
He returned from it a changed man: irascible, uncommunicative and consumed by his own demons.
‘I can’t even remember Mum sitting down to eat a meal with us. She was always on the go. She had never been to a hairdresser, much less had a manicure or a facial.’
Kay’s teachers certainly didn’t imagine success for her as a writer, and scolded her for her imagination.
She never forgot her humiliation at submitting an English composition entitled ‘My ideal garden’ which envisioned shafts of light and lifts between levels.
‘It was marked: “Very silly. 4/10.” I’ve never forgotten it,’ she said.
Her imaginary world evolved as a protection against the maelstrom of her parents’ marriage.
Her father George was Catholic, her mother Dinah was Jewish and their relationship was vicious and miserable. It wasn’t unusual for Dinah to have two black eyes.
‘I was only four,’ Kay remembered, ‘but I know it was a violent break-up. I came into the front room and found her lying on the floor.
‘I looked out of the window and saw my father walking past the hedge carrying a suitcase. He didn’t even say goodbye.’
Kay left school at 16 and went to secretarial college, but her studies were cut short after she met Anthony in 1967.
She believed him when he rashly told her he couldn’t have children. After they slept together twice, she was pregnant.
Anthony was thrilled and they were married within months. He took a job as a bus conductor to help pay for the baby’s clothes.
Kay’s friend Linda Neary, who later became her personal assistant, remembered the transformation.
At 15, they were hanging out together at a coffee shop called the Blue Gardenia in Leeds: ‘Kay was a mod with cropped hair, a suede coat and big boots.’
Kay, pictured on the right in her 20s with her two daughters, went to university after a recommendation from her tutor. Much of her writing was based around family life
Only a year later, ‘she seemed so grown up, a mature mother and housewife, whereas I was still at school’.
After the wedding, Kay and her bridegroom shared his single bed at his mother Sybil’s house, an arrangement that almost ended the marriage before it was properly begun. ‘After we’d been married ten days,’ she said, ‘I decided I wanted to go back home.
‘I missed my mother and brother, and Sybil was possessive. She told me to make sure my make-up was on, and that I had his tea on the table as he came through the door. She also said that all men have affairs.’
They stayed together and, when a second daughter arrived, Kay went to college to earn childcare qualifications so she could set up a playgroup with Linda for their children.
That ignited a passion for study and she enrolled on a drama course, not sure whether she wanted to write or act.
That brought more ructions at home: ‘I would want to talk constantly about Hardy and Shakespeare. Anthony felt totally inadequate. He was afraid I would leave him. There were a lot of rows.’
The marriage was saved when
