It’s such a shame, but Frank and his dysfunctional family will call it a day

THE creator of the television drama Shameless has called time on the series after ten years.

Writer Paul Abbott announced that dysfunctional Frank Gallagher and his family would make one last outing on the Chatsworth Estate with a new Channel 4 series to be broadcast early next year.

The broadcast, in 2013, will mark ten years since the drama was first filmed in Manchester in 2003.

Abbott said: “Its tenth 
anniversary seems a fitting time to shut the book on Shameless. We’ve had an absolute ball making this stuff up for a living. We’ve given back in spades and got away with absolute murder, on behalf of such a fantastically outspoken audience.

“But this is also the year my dad died and he was, in abstract, my core inspiration for starting the whole Shameless party rolling, I wanted to make invisible people vivid. Closing the two eras in the same year feels very right. Now I’m off to build the next whatever-it-is.”

Shameless first aired on 
Channel 4 in January 2004.