‘I wanted to write a funny forensics show,” says Paul Abbott. “It’s never been done.” Nobody watched Silent Witness for the laughs. Bones only tried to be funny.
Wolfe is the award-winning 61-year-old TV writer’s attempt at defibrillating an ailing genre. When we first see our hero, Professor Wolfe Kinteh, wearing a hazmat suit, northwest England’s leading forensic scientist is investigating a corpse found in the deboning machine at a meat processing plant. While most of the body has been minced, its legs rise comically in the air. Was it, Wolfe wonders, an accident or did someone push the start button while the engineer was greasing the cogs? Have a guess.
“When my seven-year-old daughter howled with laughter at the body, I knew I’d done something right,” says Abbott. Hold on. Your daughter’s seven? “She must have watched 15 versions of that scene,” he says. “I would have taken her on set but Covid restrictions prevented that.”
Allowing your seven-year-old to watch gory TV is doubtless contrary to Mumsnet parenting parameters, but Abbott family values have made her an astute critic. “When Wolfe examines the body parts, she goes: ‘They’re plastic!’” TV has also helped her to read. “I always have the subtitles on because my hearing’s not great, and her reading is advanced because of them.”
Abbott has a weaker stomach than his daughter. “I wrote two scenes I can’t bear to watch.” The one where the stomach of a ricin-addled corpse explodes over Wolfe’s colleagues while he dives for cover, knowing what’s coming? “Not that one.” When a body projectile vomits a pacemaker that one of Wolfe’s team later ingeniously hacks for data? “Not that either. It’s when they stick the needle in the vitreous humour,” he says. “I’ve had laser surgery on both eyes. No problem. But that needle going in the eye. No!” Then there is another moment in which Wolfe tries to talk a woman down from the roof of a Manchester high rise. “Can’t watch it.”
Abbott has long revelled in writing what he calls barely feasible stuff. On Children’s Ward, which he wrote when he was hardly out of his teens but already a Coronation Street staffer, Abbott often made up illnesses and the drugs to treat them. Will Wolfe be denounced as inaccurate? “No. We’ve done our homework. But I’m not burdened by plausibility. That’s not what drama is for.”
Rather, Wolfe is, yet again, the result of Abbott dredging his own psyche for flaws to project on to a character. “I’m bipolar and Wolfe’s manic episodes are like mine. His glee when he’s bending the rules or solving a case is just like me when I’m on one, when I start writing at 5.30am then come out at 1.30am with 16 pages.”
We first see the professor, played by the compelling Babou Ceesay, scaling the garden wall of his ex’s house. He breaks in and collects DNA from the semen on her sheets. But it’s not just that Wolfe is breaking and entering, nor that he is illegally using his work skills to get the dope on her new lover. It’s that he is never more alive, never more wired than when going wildly off-grid. Wolfe is forensic pathology’s retort to Fitz, the hero of Cracker, the drama about a forensic psychologist created by fellow Corrie stalwart Jimmy McGovern, for which Abbott wrote in the 90s. “I drink too much,” said Fitz once. “ I smoke too much. I gamble too much. I am too much.” Wolfe is like that. So, arguably, is Paul Abbott.
Writing has always been Abbott’s escape. He started when he was a teenager as an antidote to the unbearableness of living in a Burnley sink estate in a family so dysfunctional, he tells me, that it passed under the radar of social services. It was Shameless minus the laughs. He was the seventh of eight children. When he was nine, his mother left to live with another man. At 11, his father went, too – the former was traumatic; the latter, he says, a salvation. His 16-year-old pregnant eldest sister assumed the maternal role. Like his siblings, he didn’t go to school much but instead had several jobs in his early teens. “Everything you did was in the imperative: we have got to get money.” He used to get up at 4am to do a paper round, because it gave him space away from domestic bedlam to think.
But thinking provoked a depression. At 15, he attempted suicide and was sectioned, pumped with medication and locked up for 28 days. His fellow patients were, he noted, adult returnees suffering from cyclical depression. Writing spared him that fate. The short stories he wrote were about what he didn’t know. “It was lifestyle envy.” He created in fiction what he lacked in reality.
This tendency is clear in Wolfe. Behind the crimes and the viscera is Wolfe Kinteh’s struggle to create two families. In his lab, Wolfe heads a surrogate family of brilliant investigators: child prodigy Maggy (Naomi Yang); Dot (Amanda Abbington), a perimenopausal queer single mum; buff entomologist Steve (Adam Long), and ace newbie Dominique (Shaniqua Okwok). Meanwhile, Wolfe is desperately trying to undermine his wife’s new relationship to put his broken family back together.
“Every character I write has me in them. It’s not just narcissism,” says Abbott. He cites Debbie, the Gallagher family’s third-eldest sibling in Shameless. “I was very quiet but then I’d blow if the family was under threat. Just like Debbie.” He remembers once as a kid hearing some boys attempt to sexually assault his sister in the next room. “I heard this noise, which was her nutting one of them. Then I ran through with a knife and shouted ‘Everybody fuck off! Now!’ And they did.”
Shameless plundered his childhood and leavened it with comedy for 11 series, from 2004 to 2013. Eldest daughter Fiona (Anne-Marie Duff) was based on his own sister. David Threlfall as layabout, alcoholic paterfamilias Frank Gallagher was a thinly veiled portrait of Abbott’s dad. “He knew it was me writing about him. The clues are there, unmissably.” Shameless made Abbott rich – especially when Showtime did a US version. As a result, he and his Californian fourth wife are able to divide their time between Manchester, London, Los Angeles and France.
“Shameless is the most popular thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “It’s also what my family admire most of what I’ve written …” There’s a “but” coming. “But it went on too long.” He stopped writing for it after four series. “When I started writing it I wanted five things to be happening at once and to really change the genre. By the time it finished, it had become hysterical.”
I glance at Abbott. He’s in his garage with a blank green screen backdrop. Last time I interviewed him, 16 years ago, he was pacing around a flat in London’s Marylebone, firing off one-liners and childhood horror stories, as energised as Wolfe on the trail of a killer or his wife’s boyfriend. At the time he was writing furiously, feted with awards and being courted by Hollywood. In four incredible years he produced factory-set drama Clocking Off, the comedy series Linda Green, the newsroom-based conspiracy thriller State of Play (the TV original starring John Simm and David Morrissey was remade in 2008 as a Hollywood movie starring Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck), and the first two series of Shameless.
Since then he has mellowed. He has therapy several times a week. Reports have suggested he had hypnotherapy to stop coming up with so many ideas. “I did, but that wasn’t the problem. I love coming up with ideas. I’ve just got back from France where I was sitting for days with a yellow notepad just sketching ideas. I couldn’t be happier.” The only time he wrote a duff script, he reckons, was in 1997, when somebody else came up with the concept for a show set in near-future Manchester called Police 2020. “It was shit. I was writing it because someone thought I’d do it well, but the idea was undercooked. Russell T Davies [best known for Doctor Who, Queer as Folk and It’s a Sin] wrote to me saying maybe 2020 was the deadline for the script. Not when it was set. The lesson was I shouldn’t write to somebody else’s concept.”
Next Abbott is writing a drama about a woman with an identity disorder who goes on the run with her son before she gets sectioned. “It’s called Barking. It’s a jet-black psychiatric road movie through France.” You’re so productive. “It’s the best for wellbeing, being creative and productive. I’m a bit of a random thinker but when I see a story emerge on paper, I couldn’t be more chuffed.”
Wolfe starts on Sky Max and NOW on 10 September.