Sold

Band of Gold begins with a woman running out of options. Gina has thrown her violent husband, Steve, out of the house, she has three small daughters and no job, and a loan shark called Mr Moore wants his money back. Kay Mellor's opening episode spends its time on the arithmetic of poverty, and the decision it leads to feels less like a fall than a sum that will not come out any other way.

The way out appears at the school gate. Carol, another single mother, never seems short of money. Her secret, as the episode's synopsis puts it, is simple: she is a prostitute. Carol takes Gina in hand and teaches her how to work 'the Lane', the red-light district of Bradford, and introduces her to the women who live by it.

Rose is the older woman who runs the street with authority. Tracy is fifteen, a runaway already dependent on drugs supplied by her pimp. Anita rents rooms in her flat to the women in return for a share of what they earn.

Mellor found the idea for the series on Lumb Lane in Manningham, where she saw a girl of fourteen or fifteen approaching cars, and spent ten months talking to women who worked the street. That research is the foundation of the series, which presents the women's work without glamour and without a lecture.

Gina learns quickly, and Carol's methods are not always safe. She takes Gina to a client's house and steals money from him while they are there. Later Gina goes out on the Lane alone, without anyone watching her back, and she is murdered. The woman the audience has followed into this world is the first victim of a serial killer who will go on to attack others.

Killing the newcomer in the opening episode is a bold choice, and it turns the series from a social drama into a mystery without abandoning the first. Gina is ordinary in the best sense, which makes her death land. Television Heaven's later review describes Cathy Tyson's Carol as pragmatic but increasingly fragile, and both qualities are present from the start.

The weakness, apparent even here, is a tendency to push towards melodrama. But the episode's achievement is to make the women's world concrete before it becomes dangerous. ITV's audience took to it at once: Mellor later said she was offered more than twenty scripts within a day of the broadcast, and the series became the season's most talked-about new drama.