Principal Characters & Performances
The Women of the Lane
Band of Gold is an ensemble drama about women who work the Lane, Bradford’s red-light district. Cathy Tyson’s Carol is the experienced professional who teaches a newcomer the trade; Geraldine James’s Rose is the older woman who rules the Lane and decides who may work it.
Barbara Dickson plays Anita, whose money later backs the women’s attempt at a legitimate business, and a young Samantha Morton is Tracy, a fifteen-year-old runaway. Television Heaven singles out Tyson’s performance as the standout, with James’s steel masking vulnerability and Morton’s Tracy heartbreaking.
Geraldine James was nominated for the BAFTA for best actress for the first series. Researching Rose, she met women who told her the work had become more dangerous, and that they now worked in pairs.
Gina
Ruth Gemmell plays Gina, a young mother in debt who has thrown out her violent husband, Steve, played by Ray Stevenson. She meets Carol through their children’s school, learns how she pays her bills, and goes on to the Lane herself. Her murder in the first series is the event the rest of the drama turns on.
Notable Support and Guest Stars
Tony Doyle plays George Ferguson, Rachel Davies Joyce Webster, Richard Moore Curly, and David Schofield DCI Newall. Lena Headey, later of Game of Thrones, joins in the second series as Colette, and David Bradley plays the gangster Alf Black. Mark Addy and Meera Syal are among the guests.
The World of Band of Gold
The Lane is Kay Mellor’s version of Lumb Lane in Manningham, and the series was filmed in Bradford. It is a world of ponces, punters and police, of loan sharks and debts.
Television Heaven praises its refusal of glamour and its treatment of the women with dignity. The serial killer stalking the Lane drives the first two series, but the drama is in the friendships between the women and their attempts to get out.
In the second series they set up a cleaning co-operative, Scrubbit, with Anita’s money; in the third, retitled Gold, Rose has left the Lane to work with the police as a community liaison officer and Carol has come into money.
Origin Story
Mellor was driving down Lumb Lane with her husband on the way to a party when a girl of fourteen or fifteen approached their car. Haunted by her, Mellor left the party early to look for her and was told by another woman that the girl had pimp problems.
She spent ten months talking to sex workers in Leeds and Bradford and consulted the English League of Prostitutes, and then spent years trying to get the script made, as an unknown writer with a story about prostitution in the North. Granada finally produced it.
The first series went out on Sunday nights in March and April 1995 and was a sensation. Mellor recalled overnight figures of eight million for the first episode and fifteen million by the second; bookmakers took bets on the identity of the killer. A second series followed in 1996 and Gold in 1997, with Mark Davies Markham and Catherine Johnson writing alongside Mellor.
Narrative Style & Tone
The first series is social realism with a murder mystery running underneath, and Television Heaven finds its ending earned, if melodramatic. The second is bleaker, dominated by Tracy’s addiction and breakdown, and in places implausible.
Gold changed shape, telling three two-part stories with only a few of the original characters, and Television Heaven judges that it became more conventional crime drama, plot-driven at the expense of the intimacy that made the first two series. Mellor reported that some critics found the series anti-male; she answered that it was about women whose lives were controlled by men.
How is Band of Gold remembered?
As a landmark of 1990s ITV drama. It was reported to reach fifteen million viewers a week, was nominated for the BAFTA for best drama serial, went to America on HBO, and made Kay Mellor’s name. It also arrived in the middle of a real conflict: the historian Judith Walkowitz records that in the spring of 1995 local men in Manningham mounted a campaign to drive street prostitution out.
Mellor later adapted it for the stage, and the whole run has been released on DVD. On IMDb it holds 7.8, though the episodes of Gold score noticeably lower.
In Closing
A drama about the women on Bradford’s red-light beat, written without glamour and without judgement. Band of Gold made Kay Mellor’s name and showcased a young Samantha Morton, and its first series remains one of the great ITV serials of the 1990s.
