Opinion: Kay Mellor was a Leeds lass but Bradford embraced her

There will be no more new writing from her. No more new telly from this force of nature and familiar voice of the North. As with Victoria, it feels like a light has gone out.

Bafta-winning Kay was a Leeds lass, and proud of it, but embraced by Bradford because, for the past 30 years or so, she filmed many of her hugely popular TV dramas here, not least Band of Gold, Playing the Field, The Chase and more recently Girlfriends and The Syndicate. “I love Bradford’s vistas. They’re perfect for filming,” she once told me.

I met Kay several times over the years, it was like catching up with a friend. Easy-going, funny and refreshingly outspoken, she was someone you gravitated to. In 2018 I was at Bradford’s Marie Curie hospice, where Kay launched the charity’s Great Daffodil Appeal, and saw firsthand how much her writing had touched people. She spent hours there, chatting to patients and staff: “Ooh, we loved your show - you have to do another series!” became a familiar cry as she made her way around. When Kay insisted I joined her for a slice of ‘daffodil cake’, it felt like sitting in her kitchen as she poured the tea and chatted.

The last time I spoke to her was on a Zoom call last year, when she was promoting her final series of The Syndicate. Kay Mellor was never going to let a pandemic get in the way of filming. The series, about a group of West Yorkshire kennel workers who travel to Monaco in search of a jackpot-winning lottery ticket, was filmed in a bubble and Kay admitted it was a “terrifying” experience, with the risk of a positive Covid test shutting down the entire production. But it worked, and she was full of praise for cast and crew: “The crews were masked, the DOP was shouting through a mask. The actors didn’t go home, they stayed together and came to work with a smile on their faces every day. They were wonderful.”

Kay on the set of The Syndicate in 2020. Pic: Rollem Productions

Actors queued up to work with her. “It’s a joy to have a Kay Mellor script. Her brilliant dialogue ranges from funny to tragic in the flip of a sentence,” said Syndicate star Neil Morrissey. Many other actors said the same. Even Steven Spielberg admired her work.

The creative force behind some of our best-loved TV dramas, Kay wrote with humanity and humour, putting working-class women, of all ages, at the heart of her stories, often with issues that concerned her, not least body image and the slimming industry in Fat Friends, the poverty trap in The Syndicate and the invisibility of middle-age in Girlfriends. For me, nothing else she did lived up to the haunting Band of Gold, about women working ‘the lane’ in Bradford. But she was delightfully down-to-earth and accessible, happy to invite local press onto her sets (a rarity in TV production). A few years ago she showed me and some other journalists round the period set of her drama A Passionate Woman, inspired by her mother. Only one cast member bothered to speak to us, the other two actors on set didn’t even make eye contact, but Kay, who was both writer and director, had no such airs and graces. When I visited the set of an early series of The Syndicate, in Bradford, I found her in the catering bus with some of the lighting lads, having a laugh over plates of chips.

Kay wrote about the struggles of ordinary working people because it was a life she knew. Pregnant at 16, she returned to education when her kids started school and got her break writing for Coronation Street, the golden gateway to screenwriting success. She was a mentor to younger writers like Sally Wainwright, Lisa Holdsworth and Andrea Dunbar, and when it came to her own productions she was fiercely loyal to Yorkshire. “Why would I want to film in London when everything is here?” she said.

Kay was, as West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin tweeted this week: “Our voice of the North”. How sad that we won’t hear that voice again.