Syndicate hits the spot as another winning Mellor drama

Winning the Lottery is a dream that sustains those of us who can see no other easy way out of our economic mess – but when the Beatles told us that money can’t necessarily buy you love, they might have added that it doesn’t actually guarantee happiness either.

And that’s sort of the point of The Syndicate, a new five part drama written by Kay Mellor and currently airing on the BBC. It’s the story of five supermarket workers in Leeds who win £18 million on the Lottery. Naturally – because this is a drama after all – the path to happiness doesn’t run smooth.

The BBC has such faith in this that it is running each episode twice, on successive nights with a primetime 9pm slot on a Tuesday and a late night repeat close to midnight on a Wednesday.

And their faith is fully justified.

Mellor is a past master at this sort of gritty, and yet comic, urban drama – the writer behind Band of Gold, Playing the Field and Fat Friends cut her teeth in Coronation Street and also scripted for Brookside. And for this she returns to her native city of Leeds.

It’s not short of familiar faces either with Timothy Spall, as supermarket boss Bob Davies, Joanna Page (Stacey from Gavin and Stacey), as single mum Leanne Powell, and Matthew McNulty from Shameless as assistant manager Stuart Bradley heading an impressive cast – but the strength of this comes through Mellor’s writing and observations.

All of this begins with a supermarket which is facing closure and is then subjected to a robbery which turns out to be an inside job dreamed up by Bradley, the assistant manager who resorts to unorthodox tactics to raise the deposit for a new flat.

Aided and abetted by his dodgy younger brother Jamie, the robbery goes wrong when Right Buy U boss Bob is assaulted and ends up in hospital. Thus the police have two reasons to track the robbers – and they’re suspicious of Jamie from the start.

If only they’d known that a Lottery win was coming down the tracks, there would have been no need for a robbery at all –but then there wouldn’t be much by way of drama either.

The glue that holds the whole thing together is long-time assistant manager Denise Simpson, a bubbly woman whose attitude is in complete contrast to the reality of her life around her.

Denise is 44 and lives with her domineering, bed-bound mother and her husband Dave in her mother's terraced house. Her two beloved dogs are her best friends but also substitutes for the children she never had – and the scars of a miscarriage years ago are still raw.

She has more immediate causes for concern, however, when it transpires that Dave has been carrying on with her mother’s male carer and wants out of the marriage – until the Lottery win has him back on the doorstep like a mangy dog.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.