Shameless C4
Nip/Tuck Sky One
The Alan Clark Diaries BBC4
Spitfire Ace C4
Despite bearing no physical resemblance whatsoever to the Black Country's tattooed Bagpuss, David Threlfall had something of the Ozzy Osbournes about him as the Gallagher family's shamblingly alcoholic patriarch, Frank, in Paul Abbott's new semi-autobiographical drama series, Shameless (C4).
Home to the Gallaghers is a cramped and chaotic semi on the Chatsworth estate - the sort with burned-out car carcasses rather than crepuscular duchesses - and they have configured themselves as the Osbournes might if Sharon had ever buggered off and Ozzy had lost all his money and never discovered rehab - that is to say, close-knit to the point of co-dependency but just this side of feral.
As far as his motherless kids are concerned, Frank (dys)functions mostly as a sort of labour-intensive pet rather than a close blood relative, as loveable and yet repellent as a wet dog. He is, for example, regularly to be found sprawled on the kitchen floor in a urine-stained alcoholic stupor while around him the offspring - Fiona ('a big 'elp', according to Frank), Philip (or 'Lip' for his habit of talking 'gobshite'), Ian ('a lot like his mam'), Carl ('nits love him'), Debbie ('sent by God, total angel') and Liam 'gonna be a star once we've got the fits under control') - marshall themselves into some semblance of domestic harmony, though The Sound of Music it isn't.
If raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens aren't likely to be counted among the Gallagher family's favourite things as long as there are, say, blowjobs and telly and lager and thieving still to be enjoyed, that doesn't mean the Gallaghers are your typical white trash cliches, either - as variations on the theme of Abbott's own family they are far too lovingly drawn to be loathsome.
There's lots of unselfconscious shagging in Shameless: underage, heterosexual, gay, grudgingly consensual, romantic, abandoned, passionate, businesslike (even though we don't see as much of it as we think we do) and some of it is sort of sweet, especially when the lovely Fiona (Anne-Marie Duff), eldest Gallagher daughter and stand-in matriarch, had herself a good seeing to over the washer-dryer, courtesy of her car-thief lover Steve (James McAvoy), or when the baffled Lip (Jody Latham) struggled with the evidence that indicated his younger brother Ian (Gerard Kearns) was, well, probably a bit gay - not to mention the physical implications thereof: 'The whole point of the digestive system is about one-way traffic. It just is,' observed Lip to Ian during a fabulous man-to-man in the front seats of a dead van.
This being Abbott the majority of the writing is taut and unsentimental, but the burgeoning love affair between Fiona and Steve is so warmly drawn that a casual viewer stumbling into Shameless from the comparative coldness of the preceding Boss Swap might have caught themselves a chilblain. The couple's romance is as mannered and courtly as that between any knight in a shining Beemer and his sweet teen dreamgirl, and hiding such a spectacular lack of cynicism beneath layers of stylistic lairiness means that Shameless is nearly as old-fashioned as chilblains, which may be one of the reasons why it succeeds as well as it does.
Sky's Nip/Tuck, another excellent production from the peerless HBO, is a fizzy, glossy, breathless and bloody satire that also manages to breathe new life into the linen suit - a garment all but ignored since Don Johnson rolled down his sleeves, cast a bitter backwards glance at his career and Melanie Griffith, and went off to play pro-celebrity golf for the rest of his life.
Nip/Tuck stars Julian McMahon and Dylan Walsh as the 40-ish Christian Troy and Sean McNamara. Once-upon-a-med-school-fraternity these two were best buddies but are now merely poles-apart partners in a thriving Florida cosmetic-surgery practice which puts the vice back into service industry, if not Miami.
Christian is the bachelor who bumps-up the corporate bank account by compulsively seducing vulnerable young beauties and telling them precisely how he can make them 'a perfect 10' ('Am I really this ugly? I was Homecoming Queen...', 'When you stop striving for perfection you might as well be dead'), while Sean is a father-of-two in a loveless marriage to bored, lonely beautiful, but not too beautiful, Julia (Joely Richardson, on her best-ever form).
Sean's increasing alienation from his family was highlighted to fine comic effect during the breakfast scene in which he realised he was the only person in the house who didn't speak Spanish: 'Please honey,' he begged his small daughter, 'when you're around Daddy don't speak in a foreign language that Daddy doesn't understand.' 'We live in south Florida, Sean,' sighed Julia, 'English is the foreign language.'
When not busy plucking up courage to buy a set of Linguaphone CDs, Sean is grappling with tricky ethical issues such as whether he should be doing more pro bono work for the genuinely needy as opposed to the merely vain, and whether it's ever a good idea to perform extreme cosmetic surgery on scummy criminals in return for vast amounts of laundered cash delivered in crocodile briefcases. Meanwhile, Christian is busy chasing the American Dream and the perfect ass and hanging out on his yacht ('The Boatox') fantasising about McNamara's wife, with whom he is half in love.
Incidentally, I originally typed animal instead of criminal in that sentence back there, and perhaps I needn't have changed it - how long before some Miami bitch takes a long, hard look at her Shar-Pei and sees how a spot of Botox could freshen up those frown lines?
Insinuating themselves into this promising set-up are more plot twists than you can poke a scalpel at: Sean's teenage son demanding a circumscision so that he can go all the way without fear of ridicule from his girlfriend; Julia wondering if a boob job might make her husband notice she exists ('For your age, gravitationally, they're exactly where they should be'), and one of Christian's conquests splitting her stitches on discovering that she's confused her surgeon's seductive bedside manner for genuine emotion. In Christian's defence, however, maybe it's just that a cosmetic surgeon can't take a woman seriously once he's treated her breasts like a pair of cushion covers.
Nip/Tuck doesn't play it for laughs, however: there was a shocking amount of gore (during the runaway liposuction scene, that old Quentin Tarantino-directed episode of ER sprang to mind) and a shocking plot twist, too: when the scumbag Colombian drug dealer said he needed his face surgically rearranged before somebody else did it without an anaesthetic, it was, he explained, because he'd 'been with the boss's girl'.
When 'the boss' subsequently held Christian hostage with several syringes of painfully-aimed Botox and explained that 'the boss's girl' was in fact six years old, you shivered. I am not a fan of the gratuitous use of paedophiles for dramatic purposes - it's usually just a lazy way to create a bogeyman - but this was an exception. Everything about Nip/Tuck rocks, as they might say in south Florida, apart from the fact that it's scheduled at 10pm on Tuesdays, same as Shameless.
Jane Clark, Alan's widow, pitched up on Richard and Judy last week looking as if she'd been interrupted mid-prune and asked if she wouldn't mind dumping the trug, slapping on some pearls and popping along to a TV studio for a quick chat to promote BBC4's The Alan Clark Diaries alongside that nice Jenny Agutter.
It was, a wide-eyed and girlish Clark revealed, only the second time she'd been interviewed on TV (the first had been conducted by David Frost, and Richard, in particular, seemed to enjoy that), but what with being buffeted by Richard and cosseted by Jenny, she barely got a word in, though in the flesh her resemblance to Agutter was striking. Anyway, the first episode of The Diaries was John Hurt's gig (though he doesn't look anything like Clark, he captures the essence of the man quite brilliantly) and Jenny-as-Jane mostly stood around looking long-suffering or waving Alan off at the station. Mind you, nobody looks more at home on a station platform than Jenny Agutter.
Clark was, of course, a man born out of time. Watching Channel 4's entertaining Spitfire Ace (in which four young pilots compete to fly one), I thought Clark would have had exactly the Right amount of Stuff to win the Battle of Britain, if only because flying a Spitfire was - according to the testimony of several Clarkishly charming World War II veterans - a bit like making love to a beautiful woman.
