With 'Shameless', 'State of Play' and 'Clocking Off', Paul Abbott is the most feted TV writer of his generation. Not bad for someone with a disastrous childhood and no qualifications, writes Stuart Jeffries.
When Paul Abbott was at his mother's wake, two of his brothers had a fight at the buffet. "Tables and chairs are flying, the beige buffet is flying," he recalls. Love that writerly touch, that beige of pies, cake and crisps. "They kicked the shit out of each other. It was magnificent. It was so funny."
He produces a toothy grin that makes him resemble Ken Dodd. Then his face snaps back to repose and he looks like Bill Murray once more. Then the smile comes back. Doddy. It disappears abruptly.
Murray. Doddy. Murray. Doddy. It's as if he can't decide whether the story is hilarious or horrible. Actually, it's both.
"I'd said to my wife: 'You don't have to come to the funeral.' And she didn't. But when it all kicked off, I called her on the mobile and held it up, and said: 'Listen to this!' It was not grief. It was anti-grief. There couldn't have been a better send-off. You see, my wife's from a very small family. Just two kids. And she went to school in Hampstead."
Abbott, by contrast, came from a poor estate in Burnley and, as for going to school, that didn't happen often. Now 44, he was the seventh of eight children. At nine, his mother left to live with another man. At 11, his father just left. "When my mum left it was fairly traumatic. When my dad left two years later, there was no trauma. It was a bit of a salvation."
It would be facile to say that his family travails make his drama series, Shameless, seem like a Buckingham Palace garden party, but when watching the Gallaghers of Shameless, at least there is leavening laughter; listening to Abbott talk about his early life, there is nothing of the kind.
Yet it is hard not to take his comedy drama series as being drawn from his own childhood. "The stories I tell in Shameless are accurate to what I know. I can point to the source of every single story."
In the series, for instance, the ostensible patriarch, Frank Gallagher, is such a wreck, and his live-in girlfriend such a barm cake, that it falls to his sensible daughter, Fiona, to hold the family of endearing scammers and scuzzballs together. After Abbott's parents left, similarly, his 16-year-old eldest sister assumed the maternal role. The key difference, of course, is that Abbott the writer realises that to keep two wildly dysfunctional adult figures inside the packed Gallagher household makes for better drama. As a result, he's offered us two of television's most memorable characters: a pills, thrills 'n' bellyaches Mancunian with a horror of paid employment and (an unusual phenomenon) a nymphomaniac agoraphobe.
IT IS THIS ability to transmute real life into engaging comedy drama that has made Abbott the most fêted TV writer of his generation, prolific in output and with other award-winning series, such as Clocking Off and Linda Green, on his CV. Last month, he won the outstanding achievement award at the South Bank Awards, the first time the honour has been given to a television writer. In the same week, Shameless won best drama series at the Broadcast Awards. The film rights to his TV conspiracy drama, State of Play, were recently sold to Universal and the A-list American writer, Paul Attanasio, is currently adapting it as a US-set Hollywood movie.
Abbott, for his part, is writing a second series of State of Play for TV and he is widely expected to do well when the BAFTA TV nominees are announced next month. Not bad for someone with a disastrous childhood and no qualifications to his name.
Tough job for your sister. "Oh yeah," says Abbott. "She went from the sister who you could punch and who would wallop you back, to being the authority figure. We needed one. You'd be trying to get to the cooker all at the same time, fighting to make your meals. It was chaotic and ballistic. That's one of the reasons I'm quite propellent."
Propellent? "Why I write so much, and push myself forward."
Weren't social services all over the family? "It flew under the radar of being dysfunctional," Abbott explains. "But we were constantly under siege from neighbours grassing on us because they thought we couldn't cope."
Were they poor? "We didn't have a telly. Well, we did at one point, but it was on a meter, so it was always running out halfway through a film and there would be this scramble for 50ps.
"The majority of us had part-time jobs. I used to have three jobs when I was in my early teens - I was a barber, which is one of the best things I've ever done, and I worked in an antiques shop and a restaurant. Some of the money was for me, most of it was for the pot. Everything you did was in the imperative: we have got to get money."
It sounds horrible. "It was only when you went to your mates' houses - I had two mates who were single children - that your realised how quiet it could be . . . I got a paper round so I could get up at 4 a.m. so I could get some peace. It was this desperate need to be on my own. School just thought I was skiving, which I was, but it was more than that. I wanted to think, and thinking drove me into a major depression.
"I attempted suicide, and then I got sectioned aged 15. That was a massive emotional breakthrough, a traumatic thing. They locked me up for 28 days and pumped me full of medication. That's what I needed to stop me trying to kill myself. It was aggressive chemical psychiatry.
"Where I was locked up was a real bedlam. I spotted I could, like a lot of the adults there, have cyclical depression and keep winding up back there. I managed not to."
Instead, he started writing short stories, writing "about what I didn't know - it was lifestyle envy". He joined a writing group in Burnley and hasn't really looked back.
"It was full of old ladies writing romances," he says. "I was a punk. But they knew all the rates, who was paying 2½p a word. I started doing 500-word stories for Titbits, and 1,000-word ones for the Weekly News. I remember getting a tenner from the Weekly News for a story."
By this time Abbott, now 19, was married, and so needed the money.
"Married at 19, divorced at 21," he says. "I was the last in my family to have kids. They were dead suspicious. They called me 'dry balls'."
He wasn't, though? "No. I was 12½ when I had my first f**k. I didn't know anyone who hadn't by the time they were 12. We were all shagging like rabbits. It's just what we knew. Girls were always asking for it. But we all used rubbers, because we didn't want to get girls pregnant. I never got a blow job."
Why? "Because it was seen as dirty."
Eventually, he won a trophy for a short-story competition and put it proudly on the family telly.
"I had to interrupt my milk round to read it before the judges, which could not have helped my chances of winning," he says. "By then, though, it was confirmed I could write. So the thing was: don't let it go. I wrote lots, and developed my own voice on paper. After you write a bit, you find out what you're good at and you focus on that. I also found out that I didn't mind being alone, writing for eight to 10 hours a day. I still don't. What I mind is the meetings that seem to come hand in hand with being more successful as a writer."
ABBOTT STARTED WRITING radio plays, but he needed someone to sponsor him to get broadcast on the BBC, "so I wrote to Alan Bennett, saying, 'I know where you live, and would you sponsor my play?' "
Bennett read the play, and reportedly said it wasn't great but was good enough. He gave it his backing and the play was broadcast. Shortly afterwards Abbott landed a job as a scriptwriter on Coronation Street.
"I was happy doing radio stuff but Coronation Street was beyond my wildest dreams," he says. "I wrote a great trial script in which Jack Duckworth got a window-cleaning round."
The 21-year-old Abbott was not impressed by his colleagues. "Some people had been working there since episode six. This was 1983! They had started two decades before!"
Like them, though, he stayed and became comfortable. "I was there for eight and a half years. Soaps are great - they teach you how to write a lot, but that's it. It's opposed to writing. It's a succubus."
So why did you stay so long? "Two hundred grand a year."
What does he think of the soap now? "Within 15 seconds of watching Coronation Street today, I can tell who wrote it and I often turn off because I'll go, 'Oh, it's her' or 'Can't stand him'. Now and again I see it and think, this is some of the greatest English writing. It can be fantastic. But Coronation Street is overstretched, like all the soaps. The first one to stop it being this kind of porridge that spreads across the schedules will really clean up."
THIS TYPIFIES HIS disenchantment with much of TV drama. "The TV literacy of audiences is way beyond most executives. We should be able to have comedy and emotional truth in the same drama. I did that a little when I wrote for Cracker in the '90s, but generally execs aren't happy when you mix up the genres.
"What I wanted to do with Shameless was to make telly that was fast and sophisticated, with five things happening at once sometimes. Upsetting and funny in the same breath. Most people can cope with that sort of telly and the Americans do it really well. I want to change the genres - I've never written a sitcom, but I will."
It's difficult to get anything other than "cops and docs" commissioned, he says. "I had to fight tooth and nail [to get Shameless commissioned] because it's not the kind of telly that other people were used to. There's a lack of real life in TV drama. I wanted to put something like Shameless on telly and show a world I know exists, but not in a documentary form because that would be confected."
Meanwhile, at least some of the Abbott family is keeping it shamelessly real.
"My family is in 45 different houses," he says. "If you go in any direction in Burnley you'll find an Abbott. You don't hear about one new baby a week, you get three."
Abbott himself has a modest family with two children, one of whom attended the family party to celebrate Paul's father's 80th birthday. "They're all BNP, so you can imagine the conversations," he says. "At one point during the party my dad said to my son: 'Tom - go out and whack that little Paki for us.' "
He smiles, perversely caught up in the hilarity of this horrible story. And then, just as quickly, the smile stops. - Guardian Service
Shameless is on Channel 4 on Tuesdays at 10 p.m.