Band of Gold

Band of Gold arrived on 11 March 1995, six episodes of fifty minutes with an 18 certificate, and it did something British television drama had mostly avoided. It put four women who sell sex at the centre of the story and let them be the people we were asked to care about. Kay Mellor created it and wrote most of it, with Catherine Johnson and Mark Davies Markham on other episodes, and her position is stated plainly from the first hour: these are working women, the work is dangerous and badly paid, and the men who buy it are not the interesting part. It ran for three series and eighteen episodes in all, and the first six are the ones to see.

The cast is the reason to watch. Geraldine James plays Rose as a woman who has long since stopped expecting anything and has not stopped being decent, which is a harder thing to act than despair. Cathy Tyson gives Carol a short fuse and a long memory, and her scenes at home with Emma (Laura Kilgallon) are where the series shows what the money is for. Barbara Dickson makes Anita the saddest of them without ever playing sad; she keeps her flat neat and her hopes on George Ferguson (Tony Doyle), who is married and knows exactly what he is doing.

And then there is Samantha Morton. She plays Tracy as a child who has learned to talk like an adult and gives herself away every time she stops talking. There is a scene early on, Tracy in a doorway with a client’s car idling at the kerb, in which Morton does nothing but wait, and we found it harder to watch than anything the series later does with a body. It shook us, and we did not expect to be shaken by a Saturday night ITV serial. Mellor’s writing has a habit of putting the moral in the dialogue; Morton keeps finding the places where it was already in the face.

The weakest thread is the one the series thinks is its plot. A woman is killed, DCI George Newall (David Schofield) is sent to find out who did it, and the investigation proceeds at the pace of a man who would rather be somewhere else. Schofield is fine; the material gives him questions to ask and little else. Suspects are introduced, Curly (Richard Moore) among them, and set aside. We grew impatient, and the impatience was with the structure rather than the actors, because every time the series went back to the police it was leaving the people it had made us care about.

Mellor also likes a speech. Rose gets several, usually about what the law does and does not do for women like her, and they are true and they are delivered well and we would have believed them without being told. Rachel Davies, as Joyce Webster, gets the sharper, shorter lines and fares better for it. When the series trusts a look across a car bonnet it is as good as anything of its decade; when it stops to explain itself it becomes an editorial with actors.

The making of it is modest and mostly right. Nine directors worked across the three series, Sheree Folkson and Charles Beeson among them, and the house style holds from one episode to the next: the women on the Lane, the cars arriving as headlamps. Interiors are small and cluttered and look lived in rather than dressed. Hal Lindes’s music knows when to stay out of the way. Nobody is trying to make it look expensive, and it does not.

The second and third series, from 1996 and 1997, follow the women on, Ray Stevenson’s Steve Dickson and Ace Bhatti’s Dez among the new faces, and the writing spreads itself thinner each time. Start with the first six. At home, in one or two sittings, the murder matters even less than it did on the night and the women matter more, and that is the right way round. It is for anyone who wants a crime drama where the crime is the least of it.