He’s played the chaotic anti-hero Frank Gallagher for the last decade, and actor David Threlfall tells Susan Griffin there will no softening of his character’s hard edges in the final series of Shameless

AFTER nine years, The Jockey pub is calling time as Shameless, the show that launched the careers of James McAvoy, Anne-Marie Duff and Maxine Peake, draws to a close with an eleventh and final series.

The Bafta-winning programme was landmark TV when it launched back in January 2004, and in the ensuing years we’ve been hooked by the wickedly unpredictable lives of the inept anti-hero Frank Gallagher and the colourful characters living on the Chatsworth Estate.

Brave, humorous and unapologetically defiant, it’s never shied away from sex, drugs and violence.

And while the more surreal aspects of recent series received mixed reviews, the show’s always stayed true to its core theme – family.

“I do still think it’s a story about people trying to get by,” says David Threlfall, a well-spoken and prolific theatre actor who’s played the shambolic Frank Gallagher from the start. “You see the cracks in the wall, but you see the paper over the cracks. They’re trying to paper it together through love and concern in their own misguided way at times, which is life really, isn’t it?”

It’s a rainy day on the purpose-built set in Wythenshawe, Manchester, where interior scenes are shot within a huge warehouse, and exteriors are filmed on life-sized streets big enough to drive along. The addition of a solitary “Olympic ring”

given to Chatsworth as part of a regeneration programme makes a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek statement outside the estate’s dilapidated pub and mini-mart.

Having just finished filming for the day, Threlfall’s still in Frank’s dishevelled guise, with an old mac, scruffy mane and unshaven, mottled skin. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, but that’s the point, of course. This is Frank Gallagher – the pill-popping, beer-swilling, work-shy scrounger, but one you shouldn’t underestimate given his propensity for philosophical ramblings.

The actor, who was born in Burnage, not far from the Shameless set, has loved playing Frank, partly “because I’m the complete opposite of that”, he says.

“I can have a drink, but I couldn’t handle his intake.”

He likens his alter ego to the Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards. “Indestructible and made in formaldehyde,” adds Threlfall, who admires Frank’s candidness.

“He says what people wish they could. He doesn’t edit his thoughts. Whereas I do that all the time with you,” he says, laughing – though you sense he’s not joking. Threlfall says he’s often stopped on the street by fans wanting to ask him about Frank’s drunken ranting. “That came about from odd little improvisations that I started to tack on the end of things,” he says. “Paul’s very good at seeing something and just tweaking that and celebrating it (in a character).”

He’s referring to the show’s creator Paul Abbott, who’s storylined the final 14 episodes.

In recent years, Abbott’s taken more of a back seat, happy to mentor a talented pool of writers instead. But as this series marks the finale, “he’s just laid out the tracks a little bit more than let things kind of drift”, says Threlfall .

This final series is set to be as celebratory and defiant as ever, with the stalwarts of Chatsworth Estate thriving in the recession.

At the wise old age of six, Stella Gallagher runs the Gallagher roost with a rod of steel, Tina Malone’s Mimi Maguire makes saving the local school her personal mission, while her son Jamie discovers he’s not a pure-blood Maguire.

Cue the arrival of his Muslim half-brother Kassi (The Borgias’ Jalaal Hartley), his Jewish cookingmad wife Esther, played by Peep Show’s Isy Suttie, and their four feral children.

AS for the feckless patriarch, Frank climbs the employment ladder as the janitor of ‘St Mimi’s’ school, falls into the arms of Sherilee and Derilee – a prostitute double act called The Gastric Bandits and is reunited with children Lip (Jody Latham), Fiona (Anne-Marie Duff) and Carl (Elliott Tittensor) before the series ends with a big knees-up.

Threlfall’s never interfered with his character’s storylines and for that reason has always been excited to pick up a new script. “The thing with a character like Frank is that you can get him to do anything, even change his approach to something,” he says.

As he and his fellow cast and crew prepare to bid adieu to the show, Threlfall’s in reflective mode.

“It’s a very close-knit community on the set of Shameless, with production and cast working so closely for so long, but it had to end sometime,” he says.

There’s a silver lining for Threlfall though. “It means that for the first time in ten years, I’ll be able to shave and have a haircut.”

  • The final series of Shameless begins on C4 on Tuesday, 10pm