British TV viewers had never seen anything like Manchester’s Chatsworth Estate and its most infamous residents, the Gallagher family. Until Channel 4 premiered Shameless in 2004, working-class dramas had generally been po-faced, bleak and irritatingly worthy.

Paul Abbott’s comedy-drama was different, unashamedly offering a picture of a vibrant, joyous, warts-and-all culture. In the very first episode, the drama nailed its colours to the mast with an exhilarating montage of scenes, cut at breakneck pace: an estate party around a burning car; a blow job offered in return for help with homework; gay porn; a nightclub robbery and violence; drugs and sex on the kitchen floor – and all before the first ad break.

And then, which is the genius of Abbott, there is the post-party come down, as the alcoholic Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) makes his entrance, carried into his house unconscious by a couple of coppers.  

The mood changes abruptly. Fiona (Anne-Marie Duff) – Frank’s eldest daughter, who parents her six siblings in her father’s absence – has had her night out with middle-class Steve (James McAvoy) ended by Frank’s arrival, and is mortified. In just one look from Duff, the viewer sees what Fiona is feeling – that her life, scrimping and slaving to hold together a wildly dysfunctional family, is incompatible with any future with Steve. 

Of course, we soon discover that Steve is a failed medical student who has turned to stealing cars, and is not such a fish out of water on the Chatsworth Estate.

The multi-RTS-award-winner Abbott, who had already made his mark penning scripts for Cracker, and creating Clocking Off and State of Play, was writing from experience. 

“So what if I’m not an astronaut or the prime minster or a football player, I am Vernon Francis Gallagher, I came, I saw, I drunk the fucking lot."

Born into a large Burnley family, he was deserted by both parents and brought up by his oldest sister, just like the fictional Gallagher family. During his childhood, Abbott attempted suicide and spent time in a mental hospital.

He told The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries in 2005, following the huge critical success of the first series: “The stories I tell in Shameless are accurate to what I know. I can point to the source of every single story.”

The right hated Shameless for its acceptance of criminality, glorification of excess and, most of all, for its lack of so-called “family values”. “Feckless Frank” Gallagher, in particular, became a bête noire, for his “Shameless-style parenting”. Had they bothered to watch the series, Tory politicians couldn’t have failed to notice that Shameless actually celebrated the idea of family – the Gallaghers are a close, loving and indestructible unit. 

Frank Gallagher is a comic monster, prone to frequent self-justification: “So what if I’m not an astronaut or the prime minster or a football player, I am Vernon Francis Gallagher, I came, I saw, I drunk the fucking lot.”

He is dissolute, selfish, self-pitying and violent – in one shocking scene early in the series, he headbutts his teenage son Ian (Gerard Kearns) – but, thanks to Abbott’s writing and Threlfall’s portrayal, Frank is oddly likeable.

Shameless spawned a highly successful US version with William H Macy as Frank Gallagher, which ran for 11 consistently strong seasons until 2021.

The British original ran for the same number of series until its swansong in 2013, but it had run out of steam years earlier. Frank remained ever present, but Duff and McAvoy left after series 2. The Gallaghers’ riotous neighbours Kev and Veronica (Dean Lennox Kelly and Maxine Peake) departed at the start of series 4 and were rapidly followed by Frank’s agoraphobic and daytime-TV- and sex-obsessed girlfriend, Sheila (Maggie O’Neill). 

For the remainder of its run, the Maguire family became the focus of the show, which became more of a soap, less of a drama. The first few series of Shameless, though, are as good as British TV drama gets.

The first seven series of Shameless are available on All 4.