ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Shameless is a model for understanding how class is read through ethnicity, and how shame and shamelessness are projected onto a civil/savage binary. It shows that how to be without or beyond shame in the British underclass is a position that is ethnically – even tribally – marked as Irish, historically the British states internal other, and how that structure is naturalised, 'unseen' to the viewer. Shameless also parodies the stereotypes; the knowing wryness of its tone is simultaneously deconstructive and sentimental. Shameless the drama did inspire one or two twenty-first century journalists to do their own slumming in the West Gorton estate where the drama is filmed. The cacophony of sex and its associated transgressions to be enjoyed by the Shameless viewer is counterposed with the family's own code of ironic but warm affection; loyality is the 'moral containment' for this queer transgression.
