CREATOR PAUL ABBOTT ON SHAMELESS

I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind for years. It’s a real scotch broth of my experience, but it’s not bleak or sentimental, it’s the total opposite – just really funny and outrageous.

I hung onto the title Shameless for its irony, the kind of accusation outsiders would have chucked at my family back in the 1970s. To observers we were a chaotic bunch of kids trying to bring ourselves up after both parents had walked. No doubt about it, we were a mess. But how were we to know that?

The deserting parents, the teenage pregnancies, the lack of legitimate income, the criminal sentences... Chaos became the norm and our threshold for tolerating upheaval was tested to the nth degree. From this accelerated growth spurt came the rewards of accelerated life skills - we could all cook, clean, decorate a room at three in the morning, strip a bike (someone else’s) down to its basic components without leaving forensic traces, and the ones of us who hadn’t got pregnant or got anyone else pregnant, knew more about contraception than we needed to. Bits of that life were unmissable.

Imagine a teenage party where your parents clear out to give you run of the house - but for six years! The lack of constraints could often be stimulating. I remember us once spending about half our household budget on all top ten singles of that week - just so we could open the windows, whack up the volume and make the street think we were loaded. What parent would have countenanced that?

Until we matured to start our separate lives, we had no idea things should or could be any better.

Ignorance being bliss was our most treasured human asset. We’d been loud, aggressive, primitive and anarchic. But I never once recall us feeling... Shameless.