Things have got bigger since Kay Mellor first wrote
Fat Friends, the Leeds born writer’s diet-club-set comedy drama, which ran for
four series between 2000 and 2005. In the intervening twelve years since the
series ended, female body image has taken an even more self-conscious turn and
diets have grown faddier, while obesity has been on the rise despite this.
It seems timely, then, for Mellor to revisit the world
of ardent slimmers Kelly, Betty, Lauren and co, bringing things bang up to date
for an even more confusing world of gut-busting exercises and calorie-burning
yarns. Mellor has done this by way of Fat Friends – The Musical, a brand new touring
stage show which has already checked in to Edinburgh Playhouse prior to runs in
Glasgow next week, with Aberdeen to follow.
“I’ve wanted to do a musical for years and years,”
says Mellor. “I wanted to watch something sat in an auditorium where the power
of music can elevate a moment and an emotion onstage. A producer had come to me
to write the book for a different project, but in the end that didn’t work out,
and I thought, you know what, if I’m going to do a musical, I should do
something that matters personally to me.”
Mellor found herself thinking about body image again.
“People are bigger now than they’ve ever been before,”
she says, “and I think we’re much more aware of obesity. At the same time, there
are people commenting more on the size of people.”
This led her back to Fat Friends.
“I loved all my characters,” says Mellor, “but after
the fourth series I decided against doing a fifth one. I thought I’d said what
I had to say, and that was that, but now we’re living in different times, and
things are much worse. People are buying pills off the internet and taking any
old rubbish to try and get thinner, and that’s a recipe for disaster. The
slimming clubs are getting richer, but people are still getting fatter.
Three-quarters of the nation are on some kind of diet, so I think what we’re
doing with the show touches everybody’s lives. Food isn’t like cigarettes or
alcohol. You can stop smoking, and you can stop drinking, but you can’t not eat, or you’ll die. That’s the bottom line in this
world.”
As with the first series of the TV version, Fat
Friends – The Musical is set in the run up to the wedding of Kelly, here played
by Jodie Prenger, and Kevin, as all involved attempt to get fit for the big
day.
“I don’t want to be po-faced,” says Mellor. “I want to
make people laugh and sing, and then think. Every writer has their way of doing
things, and that’s mine. I love to hear people laugh and then see them buy the
t-shirts saying diets are crap. My overall message is a really positive one,
and I want everyone to leave the theatre with a smile on their face, but there’s
other stuff going on as well. The show brings things up to date, and looks at
how things can go viral, and how people have their fifteen minutes of fame, all
these things that I couldn’t look at in the series in and depth.”
Mellor’s most high profile stage play prior to Fat
Friends – The Musical was A Passionate Woman, a loving reimagining of the
experience of her own mother’s affair, and which first appeared at West Yorkshire
Playhouse in 1992, before transferring to the West End. The play has been
revived several times since, with Mellor herself playing the lead in one
production, before she eventually adapted it for a two-part TV drama in 2010
starring Sue Johnston and Billie Piper.
By her own admission, Mellor is no expert on musical
theatre, though her pairing with composer Nick Lloyd-Webber, with whom she
worked on Love, Lies and Records, sounds like a happy collaboration.
“I don’t come from a musical theatre background,” says
Mellor, “so sometimes I hear people gasp at something I put in a lyric. Nick
says you can’t do that, Kay, and I say, why not? He’s a middle class man from
the south of England, and I’m a working class woman from Leeds, but he gets it,
and it gels.”
If Mellor sounds like some of her straight-talking
characters when she says this, it’s understandable. Mellor has been putting words
into the mouths of ordinary people in everyday situations transformed into
popular drama for more than three decades now, ever since her early days on TV
soaps Albion Market, Coronation Street and Brookside, as well as children’s
shows, Dramarama and Children’s Ward, the latter of which she co-created with
Shameless writer Paul Abbot.
Mellor became an actress after studying at the
Leeds-based Bretton Hall College, where alumni who receded her include writers
John Godber and Colin Welland. Mellor appeared on TV in Just Us, a children’s
family drama she created, and in her own adaptation of Jane Eyre. Much of her
writing has focused on the lives of working class women, from Band of Gold, set
in the world of prostitution on the streets of Bradford, through to such warm-hearted
dramas as Playing the Field, Girls’ Night, Between The Sheets. Post Fat Friends
work includes the likes of In the Club and Love, Lies and Records, which
starred Scottish actress Ashley Jensen. Most recently, Girlfriends focused on a
trio of female friends of a certain age who must face up to the
responsibilities life has brought with it.
Last year as well, Mellor was executive producer on Overshadowed,
a BBC 3 drama co-written by Irish actress and playwright Eva O’Connor, who has
appeared in her own work on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe several times, and
who based the series on her own stage play of the same name. Written with younger
audiences in mind, Overshadowed was a point-of-view story of a teenage vlogger
whose life is turned upside down by an eating disorder. While Mellor has
described the series as a companion piece to Fat Friends, it is unlikely that
the darkness of Overshadowed would work as a musical. For Mellor, however, right
now you get the impression she’s relishing every second of the experience.
“I did a lot of shows back to back last year,” she
says, “so really I’m having a little bit of a break. I think one television
show a year is enough, and this whole experience of musical theatre is so
positive for me, it would be awful if I couldn’t enjoy the fruits of that. I’ve
turned things down to do this, and now I’ve done it, I might do another one.
But whatever I do, it’s important that I write about what I love in the place I
love.”
Mellor is talking about Leeds, the place that provided her with the sorts of community spirit her work is full of.
Mellor is talking about Leeds, the place that provided her with the sorts of community spirit her work is full of.
Fat Friends - The Musical, King’s Theatre, Glasgow,
April 30-May 5; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, May 21-26.
The Herald, April 26th 2018
ends
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