The Hard Man of British Television

Paul Abbott is a busy man these days. How busy? Well…
“Spielberg’s people called the office to arrange a meeting,” he confesses. “But I just couldn’t face it. I felt like hiding: Would somebody just tell him to fuck off.”

The tired, wiry 44-year-old with the straggly hair and battered leather jacket, burying his head in his hands on the opposite side of the table, looks more like a former member of The Fall than a feverishly pursued A-list scribe; but anyone even slightly aware of the 12 months Abbott has just enjoyed won’t be in the least bit surprised that he now finds himself in Spielberg’s sights.
After spending more than a decade fighting an often lonely battle in bringing challenging, inventive popular drama to British TV, 2004 not only saw the Burnley born writer join Steven Poliakoff, Tony Marchant, and long-term sparring partner Jimmy McGovern in the top rank of signature dramatists, it was also a year when two of his shows – State of Play and Shameless – burned themselves into the popular consciousness.
The former – an impeccably constructed expose of governmental corruption – conjured up the fearless, enquiring spirit of Thatcher-era political dramas like Boys From The Blackstuff, Edge Of Darkness and A Very British Coup to make some prescient points about New Labour’s relationship with major corporations. Cleaning up at the Baftas, it led to Abbott being handed the prestigious Dennis Potter Award.
The latter – a wild and riotously autobiographical family yarn centred on paterfamilias Frank Gallagher and his brood of abandoned but wildly inventive offspring – provided a depiction of lumpen-prole life so febrile, demented and unerringly truthful it should really have been served with an A.S.B.O. So successful was the series, Channel 4 started repeats the week after the first run came to an end.
Taken together as a left hook and a right uppercut, the two shows left massive audiences dazed and startled – both with the boldness with which they picked at the scabs of Blairite Britain and the liberties they took with what had become an increasingly sterile form.
Shameless and State of Play have been the crowning achievements thus far of a career that began with a stint as script writer on Coronation Street, changed gear when Abbott created the successful youth drama Children’s Ward, and then struck a rich creative vein collaborating with McGovern on the seminal crime series Cracker. Since then Reckless, The Butterfly Collector, Clocking Off and Linda Green have established him as one of the most distinctive voices on mainstream television – a writer known for his ability to show the strange complexities in apparently ordinary lives and the moments of normality in extraordinary situations.
His trip to Belfast for the festival at Queen’s comes at a hectic time; with filming for the second series of Shameless at a critical stage, and the script for State of Play 2 nearing completion. Add in the fact that his 80-year-old father has decided to buy a new house (“His fifth move in ten years and he’s yet to change post codes. He just moves from one side of the street and then back again.”) and you can see why Abbot has decided to call quits on his commission to adapt Khaleed Hosseini’s Afghan novel The Kite Runner for Sam Mendes (and thus Dreamworks and thus Spielberg).
“I’ve given them their money back,” he admits. “I had to. I’d taken too much on. But at the same time I could have made time; I just don’t think adaptations are for me. The characters don’t do what I want them to do. I prefer to have the licence to go off on one. You tend to end up blaming the author – why did you make them do that, you prick?”
Hot Press – You said that what provoked you to write State Of Play was the fact that British politics had lost a great deal of its colour – a development that allowed lots of high-level corruption to pass almost unnoticed. It’s regained an awful lot of colour in the time since. Has that affected the new story line?
Paul Abbott: Absolutely. The storyline in the follow-up has a much larger scope than in the original. The first series was all about the incipient growth of corporate influence in the British Government. It was provoked by me hearing one day that British Petroleum had 17 accountants, paid for by them, but based in the British Treasury. Hold on, so that benefits no-one then? Fuck off. Open your eyes. I just got really offended by that – that a Labour government allowed that to happen. These corporations are defining policy and we’re paying a huge price for it. For British television, the scale of it was immense. I really wanted to write a really big drama. I didn’t know anything about newsrooms and just thought it would be a fantastic place to set a story. There’s an amazing dynamic in place there – to run a story, they follow a protocol, but to get that story – everything is up to grabs. There’s a freedom there that the police don’t have. I just thought: ‘Wow, why did I never think of using it before?’
And when will the follow-up be broadcast?
Next autumn. The election would have happened by then but it’s not dealing with the Government really. It’s about the Secret Services. It’s a big story and the most expensive five minutes I’ve ever written is at the top of the first episode. I felt like I was writing a Bond film. It’s about secrecy. I think what they’ve done for the fictional world is just create a huge appetite for conspiracy. Since Diana and all that – the amount of people who think that her death was manufactured or contrived is something like 65% and the government has just ignored it. They haven’t had an enquiry. There have been a lot of lies, covering up various things. That’s vaguely where the series is going. Looking into the sense of paranoia and distrust that’s really hanging in the air these days.
You began to establish yourself as a dramatist in the 1990s – it’s a period that’s now thought of as a pretty dark time creatively, with commissioning executives primarily concerned with period pieces and churning out generic pap for a specified bunch of actors (Ross Kemp, Robson Green, Amanda Burton). Did you find it difficult writing the things you wanted to?
Yeah, but I’m a determined bastard. It was horrible time that. I mean it’s really unfair on the actress, but there were so many of those what I call Pauline Quirke dramas. They put her in everything – desperately trying to hold on to a really cosy, timid audience. My argument has always been: why don’t you make something for that audience but make it better. Don’t insult the viewers, challenge them. It’s not even like that kind of stuff is cheaper than what we do – it costs about the same.
But isn’t challenge generally anathema to mainstream television?
Television executives in Britain are changing. There’s a real switch-around taking place and people do seem to be taking a few more risks. What tends to happen to interesting new writers is that they come bubbling with enthusiasm and new ideas and they get dumped into Eastenders and they’re screwed. It’ll take 10 years to earn the money to pay the tax bill to get out of Eastenders and then they’ll have to learn how to be a writer. It’s always the wrong way round.
You’re speaking from experience here: you started off as a script writer on Coronation Street. Do you think that inhibited or encouraged your development as a writer?
I spent a long time on Corrie and it was the best thing that had happened to me up to that time. I was getting paid something like 15 grand a year and every pay cheque felt like a certificate stamped “writer”. My wife was a scale four teacher and I was earning more than she did. Wow: now tell me what goes in the fridge, you bitch.
I just couldn’t believe my luck – getting a job that paid me to write. But it took me an awful long time to get out of the mental habit of writing to the microcosmic and circular level of soap. You’d get to the end of a long, 26 week story, and practically nothing much has changed. That’s how soaps work. It’s only beneficial in that it gets you writing every day. But writers should do that anyway. Most of my students would come to me first off and say they write 2 hours a day. What? It’s a job, you should be at it 8,9 hours. You’ve to put the time in.
Eastenders is currently getting a deserved kicking over how far it’s deteriorated in recent years. Any thoughts?
Watching most soaps now – but that one in particular – and they’ve just become paler and paler and paler. You see all these stories being put in there and they’re just being wasted. I feel sorry for the writers because I know the drill. You submit a story and watch it just get chewed and chewed into the tiniest little morsel, so any kind of social or political point you want to make will just be swallowed up. You’re just not allowed to try anything too different from what they’ve seen before.
Is it really a kind of trap for writers?
I know people who work in Eastenders, Corrie, Emmerdale and it’s such a hard job to get out of because they pay you so fucking well. Especially with repeat fees. I remember I’d just gone through a really expensive, horrific divorce and a blue letter from Granada dropped through the letter box. When you got one of those it tended to mean you were getting fired. I thought, fucking hell, this is just what I need. When I opened it it told me that Corrie was going to be repeated on Sunday and that our fees had just been doubled. Fantastic.
But it’s so much money. It’s the same with actors. The clever ones will save the money they earn during their three years and use that to leave. They rest get fucked by the Inland Revenue.
It’s a really hard job. Most writers I know have fantastic stories but they can’t leave. There aren’t any sabbaticals. Once they go, they’re forgotten about. I don’t envy them.
After Corrie, you created the kid’s TV series Children Ward. Its success led to you being asked to produce a new crime series being developed by Jimmy McGovern – Cracker The show turned out to be one of the high-water marks of ’90s television. You’d never produced anything before – what was it like working with McGovern?
The people who matched us up were very perceptive. They got me at a desperately ambitious time and Jimmy at an insane, manic stage and the combination worked brilliantly. I used to speed home to watch Brookside when Jimmy wrote it. I was well up for manning the barricades with him.
When Cracker began to develop, there was no censorship. His stories had so much humanity but he was quite alarmist and he’d test you to see if you got scared. This one’s about a black fookin rapist. Fuck sake, Jimmy, don’t say it like that – it’s about much more.
Were you a fan?
I loved everything he did. He was fizzing. He was epileptic with ideas. Because television was so fucking bland at that time, you really did feel that this was a show worth defending. I’d moved house, my wife was just about to give birth, I’d given up my 200 grand a year job to work on Cracker and I’d developed about five sties on one eye. That was the best and worst year of my life. We were really underfunded on that show. Peak Practice cost one hundred thousand per episode more than Cracker. It cost so much less than all that bland shite, but we made it work – with the will of the crew and the actors.
One of the things that made the show so memorable was the audacity of the storytelling. Not only did you cover subjects like racism, rape, child murder, police corruption and post traumatic stress, you also had no qualms about showing the damage that dealing with these issues can inflict on the central players in the drama. The episode when Christopher Ecclestone’s character was killed off by Robert Carlyle was incredibly shocking. Lead characters weren’t supposed to go out like that.
Do you know why we did that? Chris pulled out and charged us a fortune to come back for one episode, so Jimmy said: right, I’m gonna get my money’s worth out of that bastard. I loved the moment when Albie (Carlyle’s character) knifed him. We decided to cut the sound away. All the executives kicked up a fuss – you can’t do that. But it’s a moment everyone remembers. It was the kind of show that challenged you to take those kinds of risks.
Did working with McGovern so intensely rub off on your own writing?
Oh yeah. You would watch Jimmy and see how he took a part of himself and his own life and introduced it to all his stories. It’s a lesson that I’ve tried to carry on ever since. It’s not an inexhaustible supply, but it’s something you get better at the more you do it.
When Cracker finished you wrote Reckless and Touching Evil for ITV and then managed to snag the prestigious 9 0’clock, Sunday Night slot on BBC1 with Clocking Off. It was an interesting concept – the characters all worked in a factory, but it wasn’t a conventional work-based drama. It was an ensemble piece – more like a collection of short stories than a typical TV series.
Exactly. We tried to challenge people’s expectations. Clocking Off as in, after hours, outside of the workplace. A lot of people perceived it as a series set in a factory. Less than 3% of it took place there. The whole point of it was that the minute they walked out of there – any story, any situation was up for grabs. The idea was to write this kind of anthology – like Raymond Carver short stories. You come into these people’s lives at a moment when they’re just about to hit a ballistic point of exposure.
Short stories aren’t exactly big box office.
It was quite hard to sell. So long as we never mentioned the word anthology, they never got scared. When it started to get reviewed as one, all these execs were looking around saying we never commissioned one of those. The first six episodes were all written as self-contained dramas and they were an absolute joy to write. I loved it.
And, like most of your work, it’s set in Lancashire. With the likes of The Royal Family, Queer As Folk, Phoenix Nights, the North West has established itself as a real bastion of quality, realistic drama. Why do you think that is?
It’s down to good ideas and brave producers. Manchester is a real hotbed. The biggest problem with a lot of North West producers, probably a lot of regional producers in general, is that they go to London with a little idea that won’t be terribly offensive. They never get commissioned. The higher you aim, the more likely you are to succeed. Never apologise for where you set something. Go in saying this is the only fucking place where this can get set. You’ll get respect for it.
Shameless has been a huge success. It’s about a family of 10 kids who, with a lovable but thoroughly degenerate father and loathed, absent mother, are effectively brought up by their shit-kicking little sister. You’ve previously spoken about the autobiographical nature of the story. How did your family react to the finished show?
My siblings absolutely adore it. My father hates it. Because he never had long hair and we never lived on a council estate. Everyone else, though, loves it. It’s the first thing that has ever given me any cachet where I come from. I went to my Dad’s 80th recently and everyone wanted to have their photo taken with me. It was fucking great.
What do people like about Shameless?
I think there’s a really complex reason why they like it. You don’t see that British, blue collar subculture being portrayed on telly outside of documentaries or insulting kind of sketches. It’s truthful. My wife’s auntie is the poshest woman in the world and she loves it. Why? There’s nothing but fucking and swearing in it. But that’s what people do. She thinks it’s warm even though there isn’t a single scene where any warmth is shown. The whole concept is warm because they are desperately trying to stick together, but there’s precious little evidence of individual warmth.
Sentimentality has always been the default mode for working class dramas. Shameless, though, is in no way sentimental. Frank, for example, doesn’t fall into the same safe rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold category as Del Boy or Arthur Daley; he’s an altogether more complex beast.
Oh yeah, at the end of the day it’s all selfish. It’s about survival. Frank is the most heinous derelict on the planet but he doesn’t realise that – he thinks he’s gorgeous, he thinks he’s Jesus. And he will never change his mind about himself. In the last episode of the new series someone on the street dies and he goes round to the widow and pleads with her not to register the death: “Don’t do it love. If you don’t, I’ll be able to claim the giro and we’ll split it 60-40.”
In return for that he has to look after the family dog: I love dogs, me. Brought up with them all my life.
What about consequences?
Well, he subsequently spends the rest of the episode trying to kill this animal. No matter what he does, the dog keeps coming back. It really is a complete cartoon but you buy into Frank because his kids do. He can do anything, say anything but because his kids love him and depend on him, so do you. Their morality becomes your morality. He’s just fantastic. I never expected to go as far as we have with him.
It’s quite an outrageous show. I know you’ve used a lot of events from your childhood, but you still must have been worried about making sure that the whole thing stayed believable.
Completely. Just because something happened in real life doesn’t mean it makes convincing telly. You always have to find the truth in every situation. At the end of the day Frank is concerned with his survival. He puts up with being poked up the arse by a woman because she’s on full benefits, is agoraphobic and loves sex. It’s a Faustian deal but, in his eyes, nothing a few aspirins won’t solve. I just love playing for extremes. The problem with TV is that it always goes for mid-range ideas that don’t make anyone happy. I tell all my students – however outlandish the idea you have, give it a shot. Otherwise, content yourself with Peak Practice. We’re not training anyone to speak in their own voice these days and that’s dangerous.
Channel Four are trailing the Shameless Christmas Special as one of their big draws of the festive season. What can we expect?
Well, I only agreed to write it if they let me write a pantomime. So, I had to think of a way of getting them all closeted together. They rob a containment of meat, sell it cheap down the pub and then find out that it came from a defence laboratory. It’s all been chemically contaminated, so the estate gets quarantined. It’s ridiculous but it’s truthful. We had trouble selling it to one of the commissioning editors – he didn’t quite get it. Then we open the paper on the morning of a read-through and we read about vital equipment going missing from Portan Down (military establishment in the English countryside) and you think, hello. But it’s a right laugh. I hope people like it.
And 2005 looks like it’s going to be hectic as well. Are you worried that the run’s going to come to an end sometime?
It’s bound to, so I’m not worried at all. I think all you can do really is look at how television works and try to get away with stuff. That’s how things move forward.
Will the innate conservatism of commissioning editors not win out in the end?
A lot of execs want shows just like what has gone before. They’ve crept into their jobs without having any real passion and are concerned primarily with not rocking the boat. But there are people out there who are passionate and ambitious and want to move the thing forward. Our crew with Shameless are knackered at the moment. They’ve been filming for 23 weeks and look like the blood has been sucked out of them. But they’ll keep pushing, keep putting themselves through it. 6 months, 14 hour shoots – they’ll put up with it if they know that at the end of it all their names will be on something that shifted the boundaries a bit.