Kay Mellor’s new BBC1 drama In The Club, about the adventures of a group of heavily pregnant women and their partners, might seem indebted to One Born Every Minute and Call the Midwife, with a helping of northern realism stirred in. But for Mellor the series, which starts on Tuesday, is so much more. She calls it a means of “exorcising demons, painful, cathartic”, because “it has been in my head, just bubbling away” for 15 years – an early treatment was filed away while she built her reputation for popular dramas, from Fat Friends to The Syndicate.
The added emotional edge is because, at 63, Mellor has poured the defining experience of her life into In The Club’s most vulnerable character, a pregnant schoolgirl called Rosie. Hannah Midgley, who plays her, has described them both crying at her audition.
“I was much the same as Rosie,” Mellor recalls. “I hid my pregnancy for five months, I was fearful about people finding out. I was a little runt, 15, not streetwise. The second time I had sex I got pregnant.”
But a crucial difference is this was 1967, and she was not alone, as Rosie is. Mellor, brought up in poverty by a single mother, left school without any qualifications and married Anthony, an apprentice motor mechanic, when she was 16. The baby, Yvonne, was born in her in-laws’ council house. The couple decided to have a second baby three years later “between dances at the Mecca. I swear to God that’s how much thought we put into it”. They eventually got a council flat, “above an off licence, next door to the pub. Great place to bring up kids!”
Mellor is still married to Anthony, who last week whisked her off for a birthday holiday near Lake Como. The interview takes place in a chic restaurant in Headingley, where she lives and writes in a secluded old stone house. Steven Spielberg is currently wooing her. “He rang me up in Topshop,” she says. “I was there with Grace, my granddaughter.”
Her Yorkshire accent, underlying toughness and salty humour remain intact. Her first daughter, Yvonne Francas, is the producer of In the Club, made by Mellor’s production company. Her second daughter, Gaynor Faye, is in Emmerdale.
When Yvonne was born, “I didn’t know what a writer or actor was, saying I’d be a writer was like saying ‘you’ll be Queen of England’. I had felt my life was over at 16.” But at 27 she did a childcare course, which started “a thirst for knowledge”, then she studied drama, wrote plays, and was picked up by Granada, in Manchester, as an actor then writer. Anthony started further education and she became the breadwinner.
She wrote a script on spec for the Salford-set ITV soap Albion Market; it was cancelled, but she never looked back. David Liddiment, then a drama executive at Granada, now a BBC trustee, was a key mentor. So Mellor became part of an ex-Granada quartet who continue 25 years later to shape British TV drama. The others are Paul Abbott, with whom she co-created Children’s Hospital, Russell T Davies and Sally Wainwright.
Of Wainwright, the writer of Last Tango in Halifax and Happy Valley, she says: “I bask in Sally’s glory – many moons ago, when they were looking for new writers, I stuck my neck on a block and championed Sally. I was in a room with her at Coronation Street, where she didn’t open her mouth. I told her ‘you must fight for what you want’.” Now Mellor dips in and out of soaps, and wonders whether they may be losing their appeal because “maybe we have lost the ability to just have characters”.
More broadly, while she agrees there is a place for dark drama, “I do feel with all those deaths, where’s the humour? These days if it makes you laugh it can’t be important. But Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff was very significant, I remember laughing through that. It seems now it has to be earnest to be good. That is not so.”
Mellor made her name with Band of Gold, about prostitutes in Bradford. It was developed for BBC1, but Alan Yentob, then channel controller, did not want it. “No one knew who I was. I was a working-class girl from Leeds, writing about prostitutes. I used to harass [Yentob] at awards ceremonies, asking him to read it.” She adds that he “has since apologised”. The experience makes her wonder “how many young men and women are out there who could write something brilliant, yet they don’t get seen or heard?”
Band of Gold went to ITV on Liddiment’s suggestion, and made a star of Samantha Morton. There was violence in the series, but Mellor notes it was all off screen. She believes violence has a place if it is germane to the plot, “but not if it is gratuitous and particularly aimed at women”. She has avoided police dramas, declining a chance to work on Jimmy McGovern’s Cracker in the 1990s.
“Women are more fascinating than men,” she believes, and equally central to her work is Leeds. “It’s my home, the people are people I care about. I feel there’s enough said about London or Manchester, I want to share Leeds.”
One of her regrets, she says, is a drama she wrote about Asian men grooming and sexually abusing underage white girls (“I was watching it unfold”). But a changing of the executive guard at BBC1 in 2008 meant it never got made. “I don’t think people believed it. One very senior person said to me ‘this does not go on’.”
In 2003 she set up production company Rollem to make her dramas. “It gives me control. Where it is shot, who is in it, I can put the money on the screen, I’m not told to cut five characters out [to make savings]. I am not paying for a fancy office in Soho Square. As long as I make enough money to make the show and pay me a wage, that’s all I am really interested in.”
Mellor is mystified by the BBC Trust’s attacks on BBC1 drama as too safe and predictable. “[It’s just shown] Happy Valley followed by Jimmy McGovern’s Common. It’s most unfair. If I had to turn on TV the first channel I’d go to is BBC1. What’s on ITV? Just repeats – no one criticises them.”
She is now starting a third series of The Syndicate set in a stately home, near Scarborough: the cook, gardener and cleaner scoop £14.5m, turning the tables on the impoverished aristocrats. “It looks at those who had money and those getting it. Greed and envy.”
Not everything in Mellor’s life has a happy ending, however. The Syndicate was picked up by Spielberg, but a reversioned series named Lucky 7, set in Queens, New York, on ABC last year was pulled after three episodes. Nevertheless Spielberg “is currently trying to woo me to go over there to do films with DreamWorks”. For all her allegiance to Leeds, she says: “I might go.”
