Kay Mellor, Leeds-born creator of bittersweet prime-time TV dramas including Fat Friends and Band of Gold – obituary

Kay Mellor, who has died aged 71, became a highly successful television writer 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 nostalgic uplands of shows such as Last of the Summer Wine. Band of Gold, which ran for three series on ITV 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 (ITV, 2000-05), 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 the show 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, reflecting the writer’s own experience of trying for a third child.

Girlfriends, one of her last projects, was an ITV series about three women, friends since their teenage years and now facing the menopause.

Kay 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 for two series on BBC One between 2014 and 2016, presented viewers with a mid-forties 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 that he is about to become a grandfather.

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 on May 11 1951, the second of three children of George Daniel and his wife, Dinah (née Vates), who divorced her violent husband when Kay was two.

Kay’s mother brought up her children alone in a “damp and horrible” prefab, as Mellor recalled, on a council estate in the north of the city: “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 Kay was pregnant: the father was her 17-year-old boyfriend, Anthony Mellor, an apprentice motorcycle mechanic she had 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 that 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. They scrimped and saved and bought clothes from Oxfam. Kay drove a lilac-coloured Hillman Imp that at one time had no windscreen because she could not afford a replacement when the original shattered. In time they moved into their own council house and had a second daughter.

After the 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 cofounded the Yorkshire Theatre Company, to present her stage play Paul which won best new play at the National Student Drama Festival.

When Anthony also returned to college, Kay looked for acting work to pay the bills, landing the part of WPC Kershaw in Granada Television’s mid-1980s soap opera Albion Market, set in a covered market in Salford. Unimpressed by the storylines, she wrote her own script, telling The Sunday Mirror magazine that she expected it to be thrown in the bin: “But Bill Podmore, the executive producer, said it was promising and made me the story editor.” She ended up writing her own exit from the series.

Albion Market closed in 1986 and Kay Mellor moved to Granada’s Coronation Street and then Channel 4’s Brookside working with Jimmy McGovern. She devised the Granada serial Children’s Ward set in a fictitious children’s hospital and submitted her first “issue” drama a harrowing story about child abuse called A Place of Safety, to Yorkshire TV. Playing the Field, following the lives of the Castleford Blues, a female football team from South Yorkshire, was on BBC One between 1998 and 2002.

By then Kay Mellor was being taken seriously as a writer, recalling “sitting in the BBC canteen, eating chips and telling the head of drama my ideas for about two hours”. Band of Gold was accepted by the corporation, but when senior executives got cold feet she refused to let the idea drop and took it to ITV; the finished result was nominated for two Bafta awards and won a Royal Television Society award.

She also had a parallel career as a television actress, appearing in her own adaptation of Jane Eyre (1997) and A Good Thief (2002). Her one-woman show, Queen, was seen at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, where in 1992 she had played a harassed nurse and overburdened woman in an acclaimed production of Ludmila Petrushevskaya’s Three Girls in Blue. She may have long since left the Leeds council estate of her childhood, but remained in the city living in a large grey stone house at the leafy end of Headingley.

In 1997 Kay Mellor 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 day care centre, and by their two daughters, Yvonne Francas, an actress and television producer who worked with her mother on The Syndicate, and Gaynor Faye, an actress who in the 1990s played Judy Mallett in Coronation Street and was later in Emmerdale.

Kay Mellor, born May 11 1951, died May 15 2022