such as the comedy drama Stan the Man (2002), A Good Thief (2002) and Gifted (2003). On stage, Kay acted in Three Girls in Blue and she wrote and starred in the one-woman show Queen at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. In July 2006, Mellor's The Chase aired on BBC One. She wrote and directed the two-part drama A Passionate Woman which was based on her 1992 stage play and was broadcast on BBC One in April 2010. The play was inspired by her parents' marriage. In 2012, she wrote another BBC drama, The Syndicate, which ran for four series until 2021. It was set and filmed in Leeds, Bradford, Scarborough and Monaco. In 2013 The Syndicate was remade in the United States as Lucky 7, but was cancelled after one series. In 2014, her BBC series In the Club was first broadcast followed by a second series in 2016. Mellor's drama series Love, Lies and Records ran on BBC One in November and December 2017, starring Rebecca Front and Ashley Jensen. Her ITV drama series Girlfriends, starring Zoë Wanamaker, Miranda Richardson and Phyllis Logan, premiered in January 2018. The fourth series of The Syndicate aired in March 2021 with a cast including Neil Morrissey, Katherine Rose Morley, Kieran Urquhart, Taj Atwal, Liberty Hobbs, Emily Head, Gaynor Faye, Kym Marsh, Katie McGlynn, Mark Benton, Lorraine Bruce, and Joe Sugg. Mellor was awarded the BAFTA Dennis Potter Award in 1997 for Outstanding Writing for Television. Mellor was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours and, in 2015, she was awarded the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Outstanding Contribution to Writing. In 2016, Mellor was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society and, in February 2020, Mellor was awarded Broadcast's Special Recognition Award. She was the subject of This Is Your Life in 2000 when she was surprised by Michael Aspel. She also appeared on the BBC's Desert Island Discs in 2017. Outside of television, Mellor wrote screenplays for feature films such as Girls' Night starring Julie Walters, Brenda Blethyn and Kris Kristofferson, which played at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. She both wrote and directed the feature film Fanny and Elvis starring Ray Winstone, which won the Audience Prize at the Dinard British Film Festival, and one off drama Some Kind of Life, which was BAFTA nominated for Best Single