The Third Leader: Green-field thinking

By Charles Nevin

Published: 09 January 2007

Usually, when there is a threat to the setting of one of the nation's masterpieces, the course is clear: lobbying, protest, outrage, railing against yet more insensitive philistinism and unfeeling lust for progress. Such has been the case with any number of places caught on canvas or camera or by word. So much as cock a theodolite in Constable, Gainsborough, Brontë or Potter (B) country, for example, and the sound of distant heavy rumbles, clicking keyboards and unrolling petitions will be heard almost instantly.

Quite right, too. You can't be careful enough in the era of blue-sky, green-field thinking, sweeping solutions and the continuing search for lasting legacies. But what are you supposed to do when the setting in question is, in the considered opinion of most of those involved in creating the masterpiece, not very nice? (Well, yes, I am bowdlerising slightly: the term they tend to favour is "shithole".)

Such is the case with Gorton, the benighted Mancunian backdrop to Paul Abbott's Shameless, an epic tale of the good, the feckless and their fight to survive the damage done to them by the accident of birth by laughing at it, mostly.

Gorton, boarded-up, wastelanded, industry-abandoned Gorton, victim of all that well-intentioned but shapeless, pointless, Sixties and Seventies concrete pedestrianisation and public space, is going to be knocked down, rebuilt and regenerated.

Good: fight any presumptuous or spurious sentiment, survey instead the ravaged, remarkable hero of Shameless, remember it's better to have no need to affirm life, and hope there indeed will only ever be one Frank Gallagher.

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