Kay Mellor, who has died aged 71, was one of British TV’s leading dramatists, with series that reflected the lives and thinking of groups of women, from Band of Gold and Fat Friends to The Syndicate and In the Club.
Her own upbringing on a Leeds council estate informed her work, along with an ability to bring authentic dialogue, humour and humanity to the screen with richly drawn characters. Recalling that her father physically abused her mother, Mellor told the Guardian in 2017: “My earliest memory is of finding her on the floor in the living room and of my father leaving. He beat up my mum. She threw him out.”
