TV Review: Shameless has quickly established itself as about the best thing on television at the moment, although not necessarily always the most watchable. Paul Abbott's new comedy-drama series has a scabrous texture to it and a dark, uncomfortable humour.
Yet, through it are sprinkled incongruously magical moments. It is during these sublime scenes that you realise just how successfully he's dragged you in.
The Gallagher family are a Manchester lot: tough, united in their bickering, abandoned by their mother some years ago, when she went for bread and never returned. They are left in the charge of eldest girl Fiona (Anne-Marie Duff) because tottering at the head of the family is drunken dad Frank (David Threlfall).
Abbott, whose Clocking Off pushed soap up the next rung of the evolutionary ladder, gives us a contrast to the charming indolence of The Royle Family. His characters are a far more cynical, scarred and violent lot; not contented in the underclass yet unable to breathe comfortably in any other atmosphere. They are usually immediately discernible, whether it is through a line, a stance or a look.
Frank is the fag-end drowning in a beer-filled ashtray. His face is scalded by an ever-present fury at a world that steadfastly refuses to allow him to manipulate it. So, when Frank went missing in this week's episode, nobody paid too much attention. When they realised that Frank had gone missing on dole day, everybody swung into action.
He had, as it happened, gone to his local pub, only to wake up the next morning on a park bench in France. It was a punishment devised by Fiona's boyfriend, Steve, who reckoned that Frank deserved a little retribution for head-butting his own son. In the foreign police cell, an English-speaking crook offered to translate for him.
"My name is Frank Gallagher," explained Frank. "I live in Stretford."
"His name is Frank Gallagher," translated the crook. "He travels Europe illegally transporting drugs for people he has never met."
Thereafter we followed his uncertain redemption, from being abandoned in France to finding a new home in the "parasites paradise" of an agoraphobic, sexually masochistic neighbour; a woman who hasn't been outside the front door in five years but who'll match her voracious sexual appetite by cooking Frank a nice dinner after he has satisfied it.
Abbott deploys a dose of the surreal to help his characters journey between such distant points, yet still keeps things contained and unforced. That he fashions a household and street that is grotesque yet involving comes from Shameless being partly autobiographical. Abbott's own mother left when he was aged nine, leaving him to a drunken father and an eldest sister playing single mum. It has led to some brilliant television, but we should be grateful to be living it only vicariously.
Waiting For Houlihan was a tribute to the writer that mixed interviews with autobiography. He is from Castleisland, Co Kerry; proud to be branded a mountainy man and peasant, who grew up in a part of Ireland that was unnoticed, "a world that has fallen off a cliff of silence". During the early part of his career he was a teacher. When Brendan Kennelly was 16, he sent some poems to Houlihan, who replied with a single line: "Dear Brendan, You make all the right mistakes."
Houlihan's accent is thick, his voice the sound of turf being cut from a bog. He writes in stubby sentences on white butchers' paper. The words, though, have always conveyed events with an awesome clarity. You hope that the former Dublin goalkeeper, Paddy Cullen, has come to appreciate Houlihan's precise dissection of the moment in the 1978 All-Ireland Football Final when he chased back to his goal "like a woman who smells a cake burning. The ball won the race and it curled inside the near post as Paddy crashed into the outside of the net and lay against it like a fireman who had returned to find his station ablaze".
As an aside, isn't it interesting that this journalist featured in a series titled Arts Lives? Perhaps there should be some tax exemptions after all.
After Wife Swap comes Boss Swap. There are limits to how far this life-swap genre can go, but we are only beginning to test them. Television executives are not the sort to protect a new idea, to keep it airtight and vibrant.
Instead, they copy it and copy it until the print is bare and the original tattered. There is usually some curiosity to be found in seeing how far they push the premise. However, seeing as this genre began with the ludicrous notion of husbands swapping wives, even that pleasure has been robbed from us.
And yet Boss Swap proves to have at least some of Wife Swap's colour. Here, two bosses - always with contrasting work methods - swap jobs for a fortnight. They get new staff; the staff gets a new boss. It all ends in tears.
This week Bruce Birkett left his successful London estate agent's business for a used car company in Newcastle called Carshock ("New Cars at Shocking Prices!"). Carshock's Mike Porritt went the other way. This post-David Brent world was not a place for those who had dropped self-awareness for misplaced sincerity. Bruce, you felt, had read one too many management books.
"It's hard to soar like an eagle," he philosophised, "when you're flying with turkeys."
He had a small mouth but managed to squeeze a lot of guff out of it. He prepared himself for a meeting with the sales team in a prefab.
"This is Knebworth, and tonight I've got to be Robbie Williams," he said.
Yes, but could Robbie Williams manage a successful car dealership in Newcastle? Bruce gave the sales team an ultimatum: "If there's anyone in here who doesn't share the Carshock dream, there's the door."
If you do share the Carshock dream, you may want to leap through the nearest window.
"He's a complete individual talent," said his wife, Debbie. She wasn't being euphemistic.
Meanwhile, in London, Mike would signal any impending faux-profundity by bridging his fingers and sinking deeper into the leather chair, before saying something that did not deserve such a deliberate gesture. His big idea was to ask his staff to complete psychological tests and, having seen the results, to sack Bruce's wife, Debbie. Maybe after a few days at home, he ruminated, she might think about giving up work, settling down and having kids. Maybe after a few days at home, you thought, she may decide not to return to the office and inflict something on Mike that would end his chance of having any more kids.
Bruce retaliated by sacking Mike's marketing manager, so that for a moment it was all akin to a Cold War spying scandal. It ended three days earlier than expected with Mike fleeing back north. The two bosses met halfway up the motorway, where Bruce offered Mike some managerial suggestions and Mike refrained from doing something nasty with Bruce's clipboard. There'll be another episode next week. Dear Channel Four, Please say that it will be Seamus Brennan spending two weeks with CIÉ.
Recent years have seen British television over-indulge its peculiar preference for animals over people and its even more peculiar preference for animals with Rolf Harris. It has taken RTÉ a little time to latch on to the genre, but with Vets On Call it has finally done so.
The programme does, though, avoid the cloying anthropomorphism of Animal Hospital. There are a very limited number of times you can see Harris crying over a guinea pig, as it lies anaesthetised on an operating table, fighting for its twitchy little life.
Vets On Call is a less sentimental affair altogether, an engaging fly-on-the-wall following Co Mayo vets Eamonn Connor and Paul McDermott. This week heralded spring, and a trebling of calls as the vets raced across the county from birth to birth. There would appear to be some cruel law which states that a vet will always be two minutes from home when he is called to a farm neighbouring the one he hasjust driven 60 miles from.
The livestock are afforded no modesty. Vets' arms disappear inside them; their gooey offspring fall spreadeagled into the world. The vets, meanwhile, have a practised self-deprecation. At one point Eamonn was halfway inside the back-end of a cow, his bristles tickling her coat, when the animal's waters broke, gushing over him.
"She wouldn't do it to me if I was on fire," he quipped. Across Ireland viewers screamed at the telly: "For the love of God, man, keep your mouth shut!"