Shameless Creator Paul Abbott calls time after a decade.

Paul Abbott, Company Pictures and Channel 4 have announced that they are calling time on multi award-winning Channel 4 drama Shameless, with one final series – its eleventh, to be broadcast in early 2013.

Shameless which began in 2003 with stars James McAvoy, Anne-Marie Duff and Maxine Peake, charts the lives of feckless anti-hero Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) and the characters living on the Chatsworth Estate.

Creator Paul Abbott is story-lining the full series finale. Paul Abbott says: “Its 10th anniversary seems a fitting time to shut the book on Shameless. We’ve had an absolute ball making this stuff up for a living. We’ve given back in spades and got away with absolute murder, on behalf of such a fantastically outspoken audience.

But this is also the year my Dad died and he was, in abstract, my core inspiration for starting the whole Shameless party rolling, I wanted to make invisible people vivid. Closing the two eras in the same year feels very right. Now I’m off to build the next whatever-it-is.”

Channel 4 Chief Creative Officer Jay Hunt says: “Shameless: ground-breaking when it launched and gob-smacking ever since, has over the years built a loyal following. We are in Paul Abbott’s debt for bringing his defiantly dysfunctional band of characters to Channel 4 and I’m delighted to say we have other drama projects with Paul in the pipeline. It’s not over yet and I wait to see how Paul, David Threlfall and the talented team at Company Pictures create a fitting farewell to Frank and co on screen early next year.”

The final series of fourteen brand new episodes of Shameless is currently filming in Manchester and will air on channel 4 in 2013.