Kay Mellor put working-class women centre stage and changed TV drama forever

Sex workers in Bradford. A slimming club in Leeds. A failing women’s football team in Castlefield. None of them sound like particularly fertile subjects for crowd-pleasing, cockle-warming TV drama. That’s without reckoning for the phenomenal storytelling talent and force-of-nature personality which was Kay Mellor OBE.

There has been an outpouring of sadness at news that pioneering writer Mellor, one of our pre-eminent TV dramatists, has died aged 71. Long before talk of “diversity” and “inclusivity” became common currency in mainstream media, the gifted Leeds lass was blazing a trail.

The British broadcasting industry during the 1980s was dominated by public schooled, Oxbridge-educated men. Working-class writers did come along – Alan Bleasdale, Dennis Potter, Jimmy McGovern – but they were invariably male too. Mellor broke two moulds at once by giving voice to working-class women.

She later reflected: “There was a time, many moons ago, when I wasn’t welcomed into the industry and had to really battle hard to get my voice through.” We’re fortunate that she won the fight. Mellor put people on the screen who we’d previously only seen as downtrodden, showing the vibrant humanity and resilient humour behind the stereotypes.

Together with Prime Suspect’s Lynda La Plante, another actress who turned to screenwriting after growing frustrated by a lack of meaty roles, Mellor bestrode primetime drama from the Eighties to the Noughties. As the driving forces behind many of our best-loved dramas, they both placed strong, authentically complex female characters centre-stage.

Mellor knew all about formidable women. Her Jewish mother, Dinah, divorced her Catholic father due to domestic violence, throwing him out when Mellor – then Kay Daniel – was just two years old. After that, Dinah raised three children as the only single parent on their Leeds council estate. When Mellor became pregnant aged 16 and plucked up the courage to tell her mother, she made her promise to return to education later if she could. Once Mellor’s two daughters were old enough to go to school, she did just that, earning a drama degree as a mature student. She was also a grandmother by 43.

Having begun her career as a fringe theatre playwright, she blagged a TV job by cheekily leaving a spec script on a Granada commissioner’s desk. Happily her gift was spotted and she worked on Coronation Street when it was a hothouse of writing talent. Among her colleagues were Paul Abbott, Sally Wainwright and Frank Cottrell-Boyce. Together with Abbott, Mellor co-created long-running, Bafta-winning CITV drama Children’ Ward – upon which a certain Russell T Davies was producer and writer.

In the mid-Nineties, she gave a human face to the oldest profession with Band of Gold. For three groundbreaking series, it followed a group of women in Bradford’s red-light district as they took on police and local gangsters in a bid to run their own street business. It’s hard to overstate how rare it was to see such gritty fare on Sunday night ITV.

It attracted 15m viewers at its peak and the BBC bigwigs who’d passed on the idea must have been kicking themselves. As well as starring Geraldine James and giving Hollywood actress Samantha Morton one of her first major roles, the scripts persuaded Cathy Tyson to sign up – despite having vowed after starring in the 1986 film Mona Lisa never to play another prostitute.

Mellor was poached by BBC One for Playing the Field, a rambunctious drama based on real-life women’s football team Doncaster Belles. Nowadays, the BBC and Channel 4 must make strenuous efforts to fulfil their regional remit but Mellor loved to set stories in her native Yorkshire. “I think it’s vital that the North is represented in mainstream drama, not just soap opera,” she said. “Geographically, there needs to be equality. England exists outside of London.”

She was a tireless champion of new talent, always finding time to support recruitment initiatives and mentor writers. As West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin tweeted today: “Our voice of the North, she put working-class characters at the centre of her brilliant, compassionate, moving and funny stories.”

Without Mellor, there would be no Gavin & Stacey either. Her Noughties drama Fat Friends, about members of the “Super Slimmers” support group, is the series that launched the career of James Corden. Mellor wanted to cast “the real McCoy”, meaning genuinely large actors, and spotted Corden in a Tango advert. It was on the Fat Friends set that Corden started writing with castmate Ruth Jones. They went on to create the Anglo-Welsh romcom which broke ratings records.

In 2012 came BBC One anthology drama The Syndicate, where each run followed a different lottery syndicate who win big. The four series were set in such refreshingly down-to-earth locations as supermarkets, hospitals and dog kennels. Mellor was inspired to write it by “the times we’re living in, where people are desperate and holding on to the dream of winning the lottery as the only solution available”. It attracted high-calibre actors, including Timothy Spall, Lenny Henry and Alison Steadman.

Her last major drama was ITV’s Girlfriends, which had the working title Women of a Certain Age. Starring Zoë Wanamaker, Miranda Richardson and Phyllis Logan, it portrayed two contrasting women who rally around their grief-stricken friend when her husband suddenly dies.

Twenty-five years ago, Mellor deservedly received Bafta’s Dennis Potter Award for Outstanding Television Writing. She might not have attended last week’s Bafta TV Awards but her influence could be strongly felt. Mellor paved the way for winners such as Sophie Willan (Alma’s Not Normal) and Kayleigh Llewellyn (In My Skin), while her old Band of Gold colleague Cathy Tyson won Best Supporting Actress.

Mellor herself may have broken through glass ceilings but she never forgot her roots. She wrote with heart, humanity and humour about working-class characters in northern towns with unglamorous careers. She found the extraordinary in the ordinary. The poetry in the everyday. She changed the TV landscape forever and for the good.