Shameless Christmas Special (C4): X-Rated: Sex In The Living Room (five); MOST Christmas specials content themselves with a bit of tinsel, a few sprigs of Holly and lots of festive jollity. Above all, nothing's included that could offend anyone.

Shameless was never going to subscribe to that formula. Paul Abbot's award-winning series about the Gallagher family returned with a foul-mouthed seasonal special that began conventionally enough with a picturesque snow-covered scene outside the pub.

Slowly a yellow stain appeared in a mound of snow. Frank Gallagher was having a pee, after passing out drunk on the pavement outside the pub and being covered with a layer of the white stuff.

Questions were asked by the family about the point of Christmas. "What's clever about watching a tree dying in your living room?," someone inquired.

A surprise visitor arrived - not a fat man wearing red but Carole, accompanied by her arsonist son. He'd torched her house after catching her "having a thing in the shower" with a 20-year-old. She was unrepentant, especially as she'd offered the young man "a cash incentive" to do the dirty deed.

This was nothing compared to the repercussions of the knock-off meat sold on the Chatsworth Estate. It turned out to be part of a consignment being used in biological warfare and not for human consumption.

The estate was sealed off by the Ministry of Defence, with soldiers and tanks preventing a breakout. This wasn't the most convenient time for bonkers Sheila to go into labour and determined to play Countdown while giving birth.

It all ended with the Gallaghers sitting down to Christmas dinner in a tableau that resembled the last supper.

The whole thing was as chaotic and haphazard as we've come to expect from life with this family, with a raw energy lacking in most other dramas.

Shameless is not to everyone's taste, like the third part of X-Rated, as the series considered how video and the Internet have changed the way people view porn.

In the late 1970s, the British porn scene was centred in London's Soho district, where the dirty mac brigade and a few Japanese tourists frequented basement cinemas to watch imported smut.

Video not only killed the radio star but changed the face of porn. The intervention of the formidable duo of Mary Whitehouse and Margaret Thatcher led to videos being censored, something which we Brits are very good at.

But it was the British Board of Film Censors (or Classification, as it's known now) which triggered a more lenient approach by passing The Lovers' Guide, which showed explicit scenes posing as sex education, with an 18 certificate.

By the end of 2000, hardcore porn was legally available in the UK, provided you can slip into a licensed sex shop without anyone you know seeing you.

The programme was hardly a serious debate about the issue, despite the contributions of various people, although none was wearing a dirty mac.

They included porn star Lindsay Honey, or Ben Dover as he's known in the trade. He's a man who would bend over backwards (as well as forwards, sideways and standing on his head on top of the wardrobe) to please his viewers.

Published: 24/12/2004