A shameless family running short of beer money

Tonight, Channel 4 starts screening Shameless, a seven-part comedy drama about a rough 'n' ready family of welfare-dependent Mancunian rogues so lovable that even the local police are beguiled by them. If such a set-up seems unlikely to be popular in today's scrounger-despising climate, then that's only because you haven't yet met the Gallaghers.

The clan is headed by Frank Gallagher, whose wife went out for a loaf and didn't come back some years earlier. She left her six children under his feckless, alcoholic care, and ever since then he's been drinking all the family credit, then complaining that he doesn't have the money to feed his family.

Frank Gallagher doesn't work, doesn't look after his children, hits them on occasion, nicks their stuff, and takes them utterly for granted. He's the charge that Fiona - his eldest daughter and herself the mother of the youngest family member, Liam - finds the most difficult of her inherited brood to look after. If you're wondering how a character like Frank manages to appear lovable, or even comic, then that's only part of the great skill of Paul Abbott's amazing new creation. Channel 4 describes their new series as a "blisteringly funny, offbeat drama following the rollercoaster lives and loves of an anarchic family".

Critics have already remarked not only on the energy and verve of the show, but also on the "curiously celebratory" approach Mr Abbott has adopted to his subject. Many put this down to the fact that the drama is largely autobiographical, closely mirroring Mr Abbott's own early experience. Certainly this is what gives the show its seemingly effortless whiff of authenticity.

For some, too, there is a sense of palpable relief that this is not a campaigning show, trying to make some kind of grim social commentary. But one of the real joys of the programme is that it does have just such content. It's so deeply embedded in the storyline and so obviously inherent in the subject matter, though, that it doesn't feel remotely didactic.

And actually, it's not. What Shameless offers its viewers are choices. There are lots of ways to enjoy the show, from face-value knockabout comedy to mini-epic of our times, and never is one aspect of the programme sacrificed for another. This again is charming as well as clever, because choices are what are examined in the narrative.

The Gallagher family, one of them an alcoholic, the rest of them children dependent on an alcoholic, clearly don't believe that they have too many choices in life. But Steve, the strange new boyfriend who enters Fiona's life in the first episode, has plenty. With all the choices he does have, though, he appears to have chosen Fiona, and the Gallaghers.

In return for his choice, he earns their suspicion rather than their disapprobation. The underlying feeling is that anyone with real choices wouldn't choose their lives. This is interesting because, for many of the people worried by the ever-increasing culture of dependency on the state, welfare dependency is a choice. It is also a choice for which people don't have the self-respect to despise themselves. That is the reference in the title of Mr Abbott's series. The Gallaghers are "shameless" because they prefer to believe that they don't have choices.

In truth though, the trouble is that their choices are too narrow to be meaningful. Choosing life on the dole may seem like a cop-out - but for many social commentators, most recently the founding editor of The Big Issue, John Bird, it is a choice that it is actually inhumane to offer people.

Speaking recently about the dependency culture that Bird has observed develop since the end of the Second World War, he criticised it not for being a soft option, but for being a debilitating one, which ruins people rather than cushioning them. The point at which everything went wrong, according to Bird, was the point at which the 1968 Social Security Act introduced "the idea that benefit could be paid indefinitely and that it was wrong for inspectors to chase up recipients to make sure they were looking for work".

This, he argues, has had terrible consequences for society. "By changing the intrinsic purpose of the welfare state, we stole the birthright of those who were struggling to provide for themselves and their offspring. We took from them the only chance they could ever have of moving up and beyond the lowliness of their early circumstances. We turned them into drones, dependent on the taxpayer."

"We took dignity and crushed it. We replaced it with handouts and undermined any sense of responsibility. We turned them into perennial children. Keeping people dependent means they have children who also become locked into this life of failure. And before you know it, without any need to be responsible for themselves, they acquire all the social illnesses and problems their parents have."

Mr Bird's alternative is to ensure that even the unemployed do some form of work, perhaps, he suggests in "parks and public places" or "on the housing estates where many of the problems fester".

For Mr Bird, this would help solve the problem of spiralling costs in keeping the welfare state on this road. When Labour came to power in 1997, the social security and tax credits bill was £95billion. In 2002-03, it had increased to £121billion. What proportion of this is now paid to people who are in fact working, but whose employers are not paying them a living wage for a family, though, is not made clear from the figures. Mr Bird is clear that by relating work to benefit, "we get people up in the morning rather than spending their time watching daytime TV. Recognition that you can't be supported without making a contribution is paramount".

What is quite certain, though, is that some funny attitudes have certainly developed in relation to the welfare state since the Social Security Act 1968 came in. People talk incessantly of their "rights", and instead of remaining grateful that the welfare state will protect them, are continuously angry at how little it gives them. They are literate about their rights, but utterly, blankly, repulsively ignorant about their responsibilities.

As for those who are genuinely in need - like the elderly - they are less certain of their rights and suffer as a result.

Another great television programme, Wifeswap, illustrated just how shameless the dependency culture can be. When the Bardsley family applied to go on this show, they had not one iota of shame about the fact that nether adult worked, while their mortgage was paid for and their six children provided for to the tune £37,500 a year.

As far as they were concerned, they were getting what was theirs. Working was a mug's game, because they earned less than they received in state benefits.

While it is easy to condemn a system that delivers such ludicrous choices to people, the skill of shows like Shameless is that it humanises these dilemmas as well. Would someone like Mr Gallagher sober up and get a job if he had to turn out and mow lawns in order to earn his beer money? Or would he just end up putting more pressure than ever on his poor children to bring him up instead?

Shameless is not likely to answer such simple questions. Instead, it will invite us to laugh uproariously as we gain the shrewdest of insights into how endlessly complex these issues are.

d.orr@independent.co.uk