Shameless writer Paul Abbott's new cop drama No Offence to launch on Channel 4

With his ground-breaking drama Shameless, Paul Abbott turned the lawless inhabitants of an anarchic Manchester council estate into folk heroes.

Now the Bafta-winning writer has created a new police drama which pays glowing tribute to the hard-stretched forces of law and order trying to keep the City’s streets clean.

No Offence, which begins on Channel 4 next month, follows a mix of “tough but big-hearted bobbies who go above and beyond to bring down the criminal rabble in a crumbling cop-shop.”

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Where Shameless brought the world the feckless Frank Gallagher, No Offence stars Joanna Scanlan (The Thick Of It) as DI Vivienne Deering, a bottle-blonde, no-nonsense boss who squirts vaginal deodorant in front of male colleagues ahead of a meeting – and gets its mixed up with her mouth spray.

The comedy-drama is as outrageous as Shameless but Abbott, who told a Bafta screening that his son was a policeman, has no qualms about presenting the force, led by a trio of female officers, in a wholly positive light.

He said: “I think it’s great watching a team being a team on TV. They don’t have to be internally divisive. You don’t have to create enemies among them. The world’s a big enough place to work against. We just want to watch them doing a really good job.”

Scanlan said she had acquired a new-found respect for the police after spending time with officers on the beat before taking the role. She said: “I’ve always been a bit lefty and a bit fascist pigs etc. I’ve now met these polices officers and spent quite a lot of time with them and I was in awe of them.”

Abbott, who grew up one of eight children living in small house in Burnely, said he has no regrets that Shameless became synonymous with a feckless, criminal underclass. “I’m really proud of what Shameless did. It spoke for itself. And you can’t forget that the seed for that was my family - and they haven’t changed.”

Elaine Cassidy and Alexandra Roach also star in No Offence, which opens with a storyline about a serial killer targeting women with Down’s Syndrome. Abbott said the story was the “hardest thing to write.” It had been thoroughly researched and would challenge television perceptions of people with the syndrome, by showing how many enjoy an active sex life, the dramatist said.

Abbott said No Offence combined themes from his previous hit series including State of Play, Cracker and Clocking Off. “You can’t finish Shameless and not want to better it,” he said. “You have to better it but you can’t so you’ve got to shift your head to somewhere else and sing the same song from a different songbook.”