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THE WEEK 28 May 2022Obituaries
One November night in the
1980s, Kay Mellor was being
driven by her husband to a
party in Bradford. They took
a wrong turn, said The Guardian, and ended
up in the town’s red-light district. “I could see
a young girl and immediately thought, ‘She’s a
prostitute,’” Mellor recalled. The girl stepped
towards their car and ducked down to see if the
driver might be a punter. “She could only have
been 13 or 14... Her legs were bare – they were
completely blue and mottled with the cold. I
just remember being completely shocked
because I had daughters of her age. I felt as if
someone had just punched me in the stomach
and winded me.” How could it be, Mellor
asked herself, that a girl of that age had
resorted to selling her body. The incident
inspired her to write Band of Gold, a drama
about a group of sex workers which was a huge
hit in the mid-1990s, and which established
Mellor, who has died aged 71, as one of the
most successful British TV writers of her generation.Mellor was born Kay Daniel in Leeds in 1951. Her father, a
salesman, was violent, and when Kay was two, her mother kicked
him out. She then raised Kay and her brother alone in a damp
pre-fab house on a council estate in the north of the city, while
working as a seamstress. “She did everything: making carpets for
our rooms, wallpapering, cooking, sewing, and had time to read
us stories and be affectionate,” Mellor recalled. She was educated
at the local comprehensive, but left school at 16 after falling
pregnant by her boyfriend, Anthony Mellor, an apprentice
mechanic. They married in 1967. On their wedding day, the priest
told them it would never last; Kay thought her life was effectively
over. They moved into his parents’ council house, where they
shared a single bed with the cot squeezed next to it. But eventuallythey got a council house of their own; and
when their second daughter went to school,
Mellor fulfilled a promise she had made to her
mother by resuming her education.She sat her O and A levels, then studied drama,
at Bretton Hall College, where she wrote an
acclaimed play, Paul; she also co-founded a
theatre company, and toured with it in a van.
Then, her husband decided to resume his own
education, so Mellor looked for acting work
to help fund his studies. While appearing in the
Granada soap Albion Market, she dashed off a
script and left it on a producer’s desk. It led to a
scriptwriting apprenticeship, and a job writing
for Coronation Street, where she worked with
Paul Abbott, and later Brookside. In 1988, she
and Abbot created the long-running drama
Children’s Ward. She also created Families.But it was Band of Gold, starring Samantha
Morton, Cathy Tyson and Geraldine James,
that propelled Mellor into the first rank of TV writers. It was
filmed on location in Bradford, and her subsequent dramas were
also set and made in Yorkshire – though not all were as gritty. Fat
Friends was about the members of a slimming club, and co-starred
James Corden, in one of his first acting roles (Mellor had seen
him in a Tango ad); The Syndicate was about the varying fates
of a series of lottery winners; In the Club followed the fortunes
of a group of women who’d met at a prenatal class. Mellor’s
work tended to flip “briskly between tears and laughter”, said The
Daily Telegraph – much, as she pointed out, like life itself. “You’re
passionately in love with someone, they leave, so you chase them
down the ring road in your nightie. It’s tragic, but it’s funny.”
Five years ago, she and Anthony celebrated their golden wedding
anniversary. He survives her, with their daughters, the actress
Gaynor Faye and the producer and actress Yvonne Francas.Kay Mellor
1951-2022Early in his career, he was in a
hit band with Demis Roussos;
later, he wrote the score for
Ridley Scott’s sci-fi epic Blade
Runner. But Vangelis, who has died aged 79, will
be remembered for the soaring music he wrote
for the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, said The Daily
Telegraph. The film was about two outsiders
competing in the 1924 Olympics, and Vangelis’s
Oscar-winning theme, with its “pulsating high-
gloss synthesiser melody”, has been the backdrop
to several more recent Games; in London in
2012, it was memorably performed at the opening
ceremony by the London Symphony Orchestra,
conducted by Simon Rattle, and featuring a
disruptive appearance by Rowan Atkinson in
character as Mr Bean. Yet Vangelis was
“dismissive” of the score’s enormous popularity, calling it “only
another piece of music”; he hadn’t even bothered to attend the
Academy Award ceremony to pick up his statuette.The son of a property developer, Evángelos Odysséas
Papathanassíou was born in 1943 and brought up in Athens.
He showed an early talent for music, but he wasn’t interested in
formal lessons, or in learning to read music. He preferred learning
by himself, and from a very young age he was experimenting with
sound, by banging pots together, or attaching nails to the strings
of his parents’ piano. Aged 18, he was given a Hammond organ,
which he painted gold and, after leaving the Athens School of FineArts, he renamed himself Vangelis and founded
a band, the Forminx, which had huge success in
Greece. It broke up following the 1967 military
coup, and Vangelis moved to Paris, where he
founded the prog-psychedelic rock group
Aphrodite’s Child with fellow ex-pat Demis
Roussos. They had a string of hits in Europe, and
in 1972, produced the critically lauded, wildly
experimental double album 666 ; but Vangelis felt
constrained by the demands put on commercial
recording artists, and in 1974 he moved to
London to focus on electronic music, at his own
studio in Marylebone. He produced various film
scores, and also began a collaboration with Jon
Anderson, the vocalist from the rock band Yes;
they released three albums as Jon and Vangelis.Vangelis’s theme for Chariots topped the charts in the United
States, said The Times, but his score for Blade Runner, with its
sinister evocation of a dystopian Los Angeles, was arguably even
more influential. His later film scores included those for 1492:
Conquest of Paradise (1992) and Alexander (2004). He also wrote
music for ballet, for Nasa, for the European Space Agency, and for
Stephen Hawking’s memorial service. Vangelis was reticent about
his private life, and rarely gave interviews. Commercial success, he
once said, was “sweet and treacherous”, and he’d tried not to get
caught up in it. “You might sell a million records while feeling
like a failure. Or you might not sell anything feeling very happy,”
he said. “I don’t want to be successful. I want to be me.”Vangelis
1943-2022Prolific television writer behind Band of Gold
Mellor: found humour in tragedyVangelis: publicity-shyInnovative composer who won an Oscar for Chariots of Fire
© GEOFF PUGH/THE TELEGRAPH