Brassic review: an X-rated Last of the Summer Wine - Gabriel Tate

Few series have experienced such soaring highs and crashing lows as Shameless. The decline of Paul Abbott’s scabrously funny celebration of life on the margins of Manchester was so precipitous that it strangled at birth the subgenre it created. Happily, Brassic (Sky One) - whose title comes from northern slang for being skint - was nimbly scripted, vigorously performed and far more of a piece with early Shameless episodes, sharing its cynicism, optimism and us-vs-them defiance of that show when it was as interested in the activities of hearts and brains as it was in groins and fists.

Created by Danny Brocklehurst (who worked on those early episodes) and Joe Gilgun (best known for his heartbreaking, hilarious turn as Woody in This is England), it followed the adventures of amiably dodgy working-class Lancastrian Vinnie O’Shea (Gilgun) and his misfit pals in a small northern town. Caught in the middle were his best friend Dylan (Damien Molony) and the latter’s partner Erin (Michelle Keegan).

The plots for the opening double bill were entertainingly ludicrous, travelling by way of Shane Meadows and Guy Ritchie and driven along by a kinetic soundtrack ranging from Canned Heat to Cypress Hill. The sheer density of incident was an achievement in itself, with Vinnie and his gang’s capers resembling an X-rated Last of the Summer Wine: stealing a Shetland pony for a xenophobic farmer, fitting a swing in a sex dungeon, cracking a safe in a strip club having entered the basement via the sewers, that sort of thing. 

The supporting cast, too, ensured that it was never dull, from Ruth Sheen’s long-suffering landlady to Dominic West’s gloriously unexpected turn as Vinnie’s self-obsessed GP. Yet Brassic never felt throwaway. Amid the mayhem were thoughtful considerations of bipolar disorder – a condition shared by Vinnie and Gilgun – and “left behind” communities, in particular the push-pull faced by Dylan between dreaming big and wanting out, like Erin, or staying local and loyal to his troubled friend. There was palpable affection for its characters born of lived experience, and a consistent effort to portray their lives and worldviews honestly, however ludicrous the scrapes in which they found themselves. “We’re not victims,” stated Vinnie’s splenetic voice-over, having deliberately invoked Trainspotting’s Choose Life monologue with its hitlist of bourgeois preoccupations. “We just have a different way of living.”

Keeping the whole vehicle on track was Gilgun, a fine actor who, whether waddling away from an angry farmer or pining for his absent mother, personified the wild humour, unglued energy and profound pathos of the character and the show itself.