Kay Mellor
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2017
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kay Mellor, OBE, is an English screenwriter and director best known for TV drama series including Band of Gold, Playing the Field, Fat Friends and The Syndicate. She has won a Bafta award, along with numerous nominations, and she received a Royal Television Society Fellowship in 2016. She has also worked as an actress, and has written for the stage.
Kay was born in Leeds and has lived there all her life. It's also the home of her production company. Her highly successful career now seems worlds away from her early life, when she became pregnant and got married at the age of 16, curtailing her dreams of going to drama school. Later, whilst enjoying motherhood, she decided to return to education, studying for a degree in drama at Bretton Hall College.
Upon graduation, she worked in theatre, then at Granada TV as a scriptwriter on Coronation Street before embarking on her own prolific writing career for TV and theatre.
She celebrates her Golden Wedding anniversary later this year.
Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.1 | Hello, I'm Kristi Young. |
| 0:04.7 | Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, |
| 0:09.9 | the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island. |
| 0:15.9 | For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. |
| 0:22.4 | You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website. |
| 0:30.1 | I'm going to be a little bit more careful. |
| 0:48.8 | My cast away this week is the writer and producer, Kay Miller, |
| 0:52.4 | with a superbure for dialogue and a sharp talent from sombal pieces. |
| 0:56.7 | She has spent the past few decades making TV shows rich with real life residents. |
| 1:01.8 | From Coronation Street to Band of Gold, her reputation has been forged by telling it like it is, |
| 1:07.1 | crafting the stories and struggles of so-called ordinary characters into prime-time drama. |
| 1:12.6 | Proof indeed of that old cliche writes what you know, her own beginnings were not without incident. |
| 1:18.3 | As a small child, my cast away walked into the family kitchen one day to find her mum, |
| 1:22.5 | knocked unconscious on the floor. Her violent father walked out on the family, |
| 1:26.5 | never giving them a penny of support. Later, my cast away found herself pregnant and married by |
| 1:32.0 | 16. Indeed, there was a stage in her life she thought her dreams of a creative life were just that. |
| 1:38.3 | But as unlikely a storyline as it may seem, she has triumphed. Now a doyene of the TV industry, |
| 1:44.2 | she's also about to celebrate her golden wedding anniversary. She says, |
| 1:49.0 | I've always been able to tell stories and I just started writing them down. |
| 1:52.6 | I was the bossy kid at school who would say, you say that and then I'll say this, |
| 1:56.7 | I wasn't bossy at other things but I'd be bossy at that because it was an area I loved. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.