The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 44

-ta no PHOTOGRAPH: SARAH LEE ML. nane Watson Sex goes out the window and suddenly it's about whose turn it is to Hoover. But marriage isn't meant to be easy club as research and was weighed in. "I'll be honest with you, I thought I'd probably be a few pounds overweight. When she said stand on the scales and told me I was two-and-a-half stone overweight I went into shock.

I weighed nearly 12 stone." Until then she had had always been fairly happy with her body. She says at that point all the research and logic went out of the window all she could think about was that she was carrying around two big sacks of potatoes. She went on a diet, walked around with a calorie calculator and became a weight-obsessive. But didn't this undermine her thesis? "Yeah. But it was great because in a way I needed to feel what they felt" Mellor's dramas revolve around struggling women with inner resources.

Is she as positive as most of her characters? "I hope so. Yeah, I think you can sort anything out." It is amazing, I say, that she is still married to Anthony, considering the start they had in life. "Yeah, I suppose it is really. I don't want to say this has been a fantastic romance because we've worked at it. He's worked harder than me.

He doesn't bear any resemblance to what he was when he was 17, you know. He has grown up and shifted direction in his life." When Anthony began to feel that Mellor was moving in a different world to him, he went to college, and carved out a new career working with people with learning difficulties. She looks out the window. The sun is shining. "It's actually quite nice out there," she says, so we move into the garden.

She seems momentarily distracted. "Kay Mellor loves breasts! I wonder where that came from!" arriages are up! Divorces are down! New figures released this week have the ring of the "booze is good for resentful of still having to do it all, and men who felt like they were both over-burdened and regarded as useless in the partnership. And that is how it feels to me, looking around. Men got married to be looked after and it didn't happen. Women got married to be fulfilled and it didn't work out like that.

But there is something else going on here, and the clue is in the new statistics. The truth is, people like the aggro; they need the constant friction to survive. Life is short and potentially tedious so Homo sapiens marry in order to give them something to rub up against. If you can find someone to cramp your style and manage to grab your self-fulfilment on the hoof; if you can find someone to test you to the limit, who never supports you or understands you or has any sense of how much you have to do, and still cope without recourse to Prozac then you'll be happily married, my son. No one said it was going to be easy and that's because difficult is what keeps us going.

ducks or digs in. Wife wants more, husband wants less. I found myself watching the tapes thinking that marriage flash forwards would have been a much more compelling basis for the plot of Minority Report. Your precogs could have got their second-sight rushes, not in the lead up to a murder but in the crucial months prior to a wedding. Then those about to be joined together and ruin each others' lives for ever could have been intercepted by the guys with the jctpacks on the grounds that Tom had got a glimpse of just how ugly it was going to turn out if they weren't stopped.

We, the audience, would see it all in fast forward: how they would start out OK and then stifle each other's personalities; how the fun and sex would go out the window, and suddenly it would all be about whose turn it was to Hoover the hall. What kind of person would volunteer for all that? Watching Diary of a Marriage, the overwhelming impression was of women who were ellors friend, theatre director Jude Kelly, has said that success has toughened her. VI Does she agree? "Yeah. No. To some degree.

I think it's a bit of an act." She Guardian reader offer trojan reggae classics you, vitamins kill you" see-saw that statisticians put us through every six months or so. Just when you thought it was OK to be sceptical about marriage, back they come with evidence that staying single gives you cancer and divorce makes even those in the most miserable marriages unhappier still. (Also this week, an American survey concluded that divorce docs not "reduce symptoms of depression, raise self-esteem or increase a sense of mastery compared with those who stayed These "better the devil you know" revelations are encouraging on one level but the fact that staying together can prove less painful than divorce says more about the stresses of separating than the strength of marriage as an institution. I have just reached that midlife stage when all around me couples are weighing up the odds of sticking it out or starting again, and the message coming through is that people can't afford to get divorced -even when they arc way over it. The prospect of swapping the house for a couple ofbasement flats, of him having to look after the children every other weekend on his own, of working on new relationships without upsetting friends and family, is currently keeping several couples I can think of as safe as houses.

Still, it occurs to me there is another reason why people do not give up on marriage and it is much the same reason that has inspired a fly-on-the-wall documentary series to be screened next month on BBC2. Diary of a Marriage follows one more than usually stressful year in the lives of four couples, but the object is not to provide us with a lot of stomach-churning domestic drama. The chosen couples were selected on the basis of the solidity of their marriages, rather than their vulnerability, so that the viewer is faced with nothing more shocking than the exhausting daily grind of give and take, nag and evade, attack and retreat, that is the average marriage in action. What is remarkable about the series is how hellish a picture it presents without so much as touching on infidelity or ill health or hyperactive children, plus the fact that patterns ofbehaviour across income and class brackets appear to Two more fantastic three-CD sets at Just 12.99 each or 22.99 for both, inc UK Trojan Producers three-CD set features 50 tracks from the big producers: Niney, Use "Scratch" Perry. Clancy Eccles, Alvin Ranglin, Harry and Joe Gibbs.

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She tells me about the time she went to Hollywood to work on an American version of Band of Gold. They asked her over because they loved her writing and as soon as she got there they tried to strip it of its identity and dilute the strength of its women. "They wanted to drive out the thing they loved. I thought no, it's about the women, and I've had that fight here in England. I thought, my God, I'm right back to square one." So what did she do? "In the end I walked away.

I thought I'm here for what? For the money. Because that's what it's about bottom line, it's flattery and money. So I just walked away, and I've never regretted it." Would she go back? "If I had more clout." She experienced maximum clout when she wrote and directed the film Fanny and Elvis. She says she never realised quite how broad a back and thick a skin you need to direct. Did she enjoy it? "I felt as if I'd been flayed after Fanny and Elvis." How? "As a woman who had written and directed, I just felt I'd committed the worst crime ever in the whole world." After making the film, she collapsed when picking up an award at a film festival.

She was told that she'd have to take things easier- which she is doing, marginally. The thing is, she says, it's difficult when she loves her work so much. I ask her whether, looking back, she ever thought work would be so important to her? She smiles, and the smile becomes a grin, and the grin becomes ecstatic. "Y'know, I never thought I'd ever, not in my wildest dreams, be a writer, an actress, a person that people listened to. It's fantastic.

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