Paul Abbott

Paul Abbott (born 22 February 1960) is an English screenwriter and producer.

He became one of the most successful television writers in Britain following his work on popular series such as Coronation Street (1987–89, 1991–93), Cracker (1995, 1996, 1999), and more widely known for creating some of the most acclaimed television dramas of the 1990s and 2000s, including Reckless (1997), Touching Evil (1997–1999), Clocking Off (2000–2003), State of Play (2003), Shameless (2004–13), and No Offence (2015–18).

Abbott was born into a dysfunctional family in Burnley on 22 February 1960, the seventh of eight children. When he was nine, his mother left to pursue a relationship with another man who had a child around Abbott's own age; his father, whom Abbott described as "bone idle", departed two years later. His mother had supported the family with three jobs. Abbott and his siblings were left in the care of their pregnant 17-year-old sister. His father did not claim benefits for the family for fear of alerting social services to their abandonment. Although he constantly skipped school, Abbott later cited his English teacher at Sir John Thursby Community College as an early positive influence on him.

Abbott was raped by a stranger at the age of 11, leading to him jumping from the roof of a multi-story car park in an attempt to take his own life. Two years later, after another suicide attempt, he was committed to an adult mental hospital; he later became a voluntary patient. On his release, he was taken into foster care and placed with a much more settled working-class family, where having two parents who held steady employment and owned a television and car was a new experience for him. At the same time, he began attending a local Sixth Form College and started attending meetings of the Burnley Writers' Circle after seeing their advert in the local public library. He enrolled at the University of Manchester in 1980 to study psychology, but decided to leave to concentrate on writing when a radio play he wrote was accepted by the BBC.

Abbott entered the Radio Times drama competition at the age of 22 which had the requirement to find a professional sponsor. A contact knew the address of the leading British dramatist Alan Bennett who, after seeing his script, was of the opinion that Abbott had written a perfectly acceptable piece of work which he would be happy to endorse. His work on radio plays for BBC Radio 4 attracted the attention of producers at ITV Granada who hired him, at age twenty-four, to be a script editor on their long-running soap opera Coronation Street. This made him at the time the youngest-ever person to occupy such a role on the programme.

He worked on Coronation Street for the next eight years as a story editor and from 1989 as a writer. He also worked on other programmes for Granada. In 1988, he co-wrote his first televised drama script, a one-off play for the Dramarama anthology, with fellow Coronation Street writer Kay Mellor. The same year, he and Mellor co-created the children's medical drama Children's Ward, which ran for many years—Abbott regularly contributed scripts until 1992, then returned briefly to the show in 1996.

In 1994, he worked as the producer on the second season of Granada's drama series Cracker, about the work of a criminal psychologist played by Robbie Coltrane. The following year he switched to writing scripts for the programme and wrote several episodes. He made his first breakthrough with a programme of his own creation, the police drama serial Touching Evil in 1997. The series, starring popular actor Robson Green, was a success, and two sequel serials—although not written by Abbott—followed. The series was re-made in 2004 for American television by the USA Network.

After writing another serial starring Green, Reckless and a few other productions for Granada, he began in 1999 a collaboration with the independent Red Production Company. He contributed an episode to their anthology series Love in the 21st Century, screened on Channel 4, and in 2000 created and wrote the series Clocking Off for them, which was screened on BBC One. Set in one factory in Lancashire, the series focused on a different member of factory staff each episode. The first season won the BAFTA award for Best Drama Series, and the equivalent at the Royal Television Society awards; Abbott personally was recognised with the RTS Best Writer award. Clocking Off ran for four seasons, although Abbott's contributions to the final two runs were minimal as he was by this time busy working on other projects.