Paul Abbott (born 22 February 1960) is an English television screenwriter and producer. Abbott has become one of the most critically and commercially successful television writers working in Britain, following his work on popular series such as Coronation Street, Cracker and Shameless, the last of which he created. He is also responsible for the creation of some of the most acclaimed television dramas of the 1990s and 2000s, including Reckless and Touching Evil for ITV and Clocking Off and State of Play for the BBC. Background Born into a dysfunctional Burnley family, Paul Abbott is the seventh of eight children. When he was nine his mother left home to pursue a relationship with another man (with a child around Abbott's own age); his father, who Abbott describes as having been "bone idle", departed two years later. His mother had supported the family from three jobs. Abbott and his siblings were in the care of their pregnant seventeen-year-old sister. His father didn't claim benefits for the family, for fear of alerting social services to their abandonment. Although a compulsive truant, Abbott cites his English teacher at Barden High School as an early positive influence. Age 11 he was raped by a stranger, 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 sectioned into an adult mental hospital for a short while, later becoming a voluntary patient. On his release, he was taken into foster care and placed with a much more settled working-class family than his own, where having both adults in steady employment was a new experience for Abbott, as was their ownership of a television and a car. 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. Abbott enrolled at the University of Manchester in 1980 to study psychology but decided to leave to concentrate on writing when a radio play was accepted by the BBC. Career 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