It’s so revealing about how vulnerable Mrs Bloggs is and how passionate she can be

It’s so revealing about how vulnerable Mrs Bloggs is and how passionate she can be”.At this point Gaynor returns from the shops, dabs a bit of mascara from her mother’s cheek and retires with a magazine, claiming to have “heard it all before”. When the women are getting rid of the body [the unfortunate Curly] I’m thinking, `Okay, they put the body in the car, but will they know how to drive?’ Better! Why would they? So they’re kangarooing the car down the street. It’s like if Mrs Bloggs over the way has an argument with her husband and she’s running down the ring-road in her nightie: I love that. People say it’s almost slapstick, but that’s how life is sometimes. Initially inspired by a random sighting of a Leeds streetwalker through a car window, Mellor has managed to steer a path between the tart-with-a-heart and turbo-slapper stereotypes to a real place where children have to be met from school.”There are times when you’re trying to get a character from A to B,” Mellor explains “and you’ll think, `Well, perhaps she’d do this’ But at other times you just know It’s seeing the potential that’s important. The harrowing Prix Italia-nominated film drama A Place of Safety, and hit West End play A Passionate Woman made her name, but Band Of Gold took things to another level. Kay dashed off her own idea of an Albion Market script and left it on a desk at Granada.

“I thought, `What a stupid thing to do, they’ll not ring’, but they did. Somebody read it and said, `Hey, this woman can read’.” Mellor laughs, “I mean write”.After serving an invaluable apprenticeship as script associate on the ailing soap, Mellor moved on to write “bits” of Coronation Steet and Brookside, and then her own series Childrens’ Ward and Just Us. “My husband had gone back to college [Mellor's other half Anthony, a former motor mechanic, now runs a daycare centre] and I was the breadwinner. I had two kids and a mortgage, but I wasn’t earning much money, so I couldn’t afford to miss an opening”. “People aspire to be someone don’t they? But plays just weren’t written by women. I remember when I saw the name Caryl Churchill, I thought `I must go and see her stuff’ just because I had no one to look up to.” Mellor studied drama as a mature student (“I’d been trying to persuade people to go to extra lectures with me, and they’d say, `No Kay, we’re staying in bed’ ”) and on leaving Bretton Hall, also alma mater to John Godber and Colin Welland, she founded her own travelling theatre group.Q-and-A sessions after the show with blunt Yorkshire audiences (“I could only write an hour’s worth, so we were looking for padding”) proved instructive.Mellor’s big break came while working as a “jobbing actress” on the short- lived northern soap Albion Market.

“People I’ve known for a long time say to me: `I can’t believe it, your name comes up after televison programmes!’ The funny thing is, I can’t believe it either.”Role models were not thick on the ground. Brought up on a Leeds council estate, Kay married young and had had two children by the time she was 18 (that’s how she got to be a grandmother at 43). “The best that you could ever hope to be as a working-class Leeds woman was a teacher,” she recalls. I’ve talked to prostitutes, and it is terrifying – their ponces are over the road looking at them, and all the time they’re talking to me their eyes are darting left and right and I’m thinking, `What is it at the back of me: is someone going to hit me on the head?’ “Her life, she is relieved to admit, is “cuckooland by comparison” There is certainly more than a hint of fairytale about it. “I was very clear in my stage directions,” she insists “about what I did and didn’t want to see. To be honest when Carol [Tyson's character] walked for Curly [well-meaning stocking-fetishist, now deceased] I wasn’t bothered to see the black stockings and suspenders – that was a choice the director and Cathy made.

But it wasn’t particularly sexy or titillating: it was more edgy.” Edgy is a word that Mellor uses a lot. “If something makes you nervous,” she insists, “that doesn’t mean you should shy away from it, it means it’s good.”Does she consider it a condition of her employment to run towards danger? “Good writing is like good acting – you have to be in it in the moment, and the world of Band Of Gold is a frightening world to be in. This is how the script enticed Mona Lisa actress Cathy Tyson out of “no more prostitutes” retirement by offering her a shot at redemption. Would it be fair to say that if you were going to think up the most morally reprehensible portrayal of prostitution imaginable, Mona Lisa would probably be it? “I think so, yes,” Kay says quietly.