The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 43

8 1 Portrait At 16 she was a working-class girl pushing a pram on a Leeds estate. Now she's one of Britain's most successful television writers. As ITV screens her latest series Kay Mellor tells Simon Hatienstone where it all went right Drama's queen script needed working on." Did that demoralise her? "Yes, like um, I'm a shit writer, it's rubbish." Did she really think that? "At the time I did, yes." Eventually, she rewrote it and was persuaded to play the part herself. How much of her is in the character? Would she steal for her kids if necessary? "I would do anything to protect my daughters. I'd kill for my children.

You know, I think that's maternal, universal Ooops, I put milk in it, I didn't know if you wanted it or not." She pours the tea, and fans herself. "Ooh, it's warm now. Close." When Mellor was four months pregnant she married Anthony, a mechanic. She wed in a dress big enough to become her maternity frock. Was she shocked to find herself pregnant? "Was I shocked?" As she repeats the question, she seems to experience the shock all over again.

"Yeah. It was only the second time I'd ever done it in my life, and I got pregnant! And that is the end of your life really. A 16-year-old working-class girl feels that is the end. She's made a big mistake. Well, felt like that -1 shouldn't talk about she.

I felt that was it; I'd ruined my life." She was a skinny little thing, terrified of the future. "I was petrified of everything. Petrified of getting married, petrified of having a baby, petrified of what was going to happen in my life." By 18, she had two kids. In her late 20s, she gathered herself together and went to college to study drama. "It was like paradise she says.

She worked asanactor.but when she realised there were too many actors and too few parts for northern working-class women she decided to do something about it. She reinvented herself as a writer. Did she know she could write? No, she says. Anyway, she didn't consider it writing. "I've always been able to tell stories, and I just started writing them down.

I think it's an extension of play, like when you're a kid. I was the bossy kid at school who would say, You say that and then I say this'. I wasn't bossy at other things, but I'd be bossy at that because it was an area I loved. I was crap at loads of other things." You know Kay Mellor even if you think you don't. You have probably seen her prostitution thriller Band of Gold; or her women's football series, Playing the Field; or her stories from the slimming club Fat Friends; or her powerful drama about living with a brain-damaged man, Some Kind of Life; or her adaptation of Jane Eyre; or the movie she wrote and directed, Fanny and Elvis; or the many episodes of Brookside she scripted.

Prolific doesn't do her justice. Mellor looks like one of her more successful characters. Brown top, proud cleavage, short Prada skirt, pink heels, pink toenails, pink bag. She could have "made in Yorkshire" stamped across her forehead. So could her writing.

Her television work is incredibly popular without being populist. She grabs huge viewing figures by giving voice to the kind of people TV bosses tend to think we don't want to hear from. Perhaps the classic example is Fat Friends, which stars agrossly overweight, phenomenally sexy, Yorkshire fish fryer. Her characters are rooted in her own history. At 16, Mellor was the girl from the Leeds estate who pushed a pram.

She was a bright kid, but hopes of a future were shattered when her boyfriend, Anthony, made her pregnant. We are in a tiny, dark London hotel. It is not her choice. She wanted to meet at her house in the posh part of Headingley. She looks around her, says London' is all well and good, but where is the grass? Where are the moors? Her new TV series, A Good Thief, marks her return to acting.

Mellor is sassy and funny, desperate and vulnerable as the mother on the run who takes to shoplifting to support her teenage daughter. It is years since Mellor has performed on TV. I ask why she has made a comeback. Well, she says, she wanted Julie Walters to play the part, but it didn't work out. Why not? "She had other work commitments, but she also thought the streets, and conversations and friendships with Bradford prostitutes, that solitary image became Band of Gold.

Her own daughters are now adults. Her oldest, Yvonne, is 32 and a TV producer, her youngest, Gaynor Faye, 30, is an actor who worked on Fat Friends and has just written an episode of the new series. Fat Friends was written out of anger at the slimming industry. It started out as a celebration of fleshliness. I tell Mellor that I once saw a quote from her saying, "I love breasts." She looks surprised that she could have ever said it, thinks about it, then give me a daft-bugger look.

"Well I do!" Mellor may have wanted Fat Friends to eulogise all things fat, but things became a little complicated. She went along to the slimming Actually, she says, she felt compelled to write by what she saw around her. She talks about a woman she knew who had a mentally handicapped boy, Paul, and felt unable to look after him but no one would listen. She tried to think of a way to help the woman but failed. Eventually, she wrote a play called Paul.

"Ithinkrvegottobeangry about something to write," she says. Does she have a big capacity for anger? "Yeah, particularly injustice. I think I channel it into my work." She tells me how she and Anthony were driving through Bradford on the way to a party when she saw a little face through the window. "She was about Vt, legs blue with cold, November it was, and it was like something had gone booof! in here." She punctures her belly. After much research on the.