It's the end of an era tonight as we bid farewell to Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) and the Chatsworth Estate he's roamed in assorted states of alcohol and drug-induced delirium for 11 seasons. It's been a shadow of its former glories of late but at its peak, Shameless was a truthful, bawdy and poignant portrait of working-class Britain struggling to survive through hard times. It also launched the careers of a raft of top acting talent and some its former stars, including Anne-Marie Duff, Dean Lennox Kelly, Elliott Tittensor and Jody Latham have returned to bow Shameless out with one helluva party!

Paul Abbott's rambunctious drama has been in steady decline for years now, so it's time it signed off. Ironically this cracking final episode highlights just where things went wrong: the moment the focus shifted from that clan of lovable rogues, the Gallaghers, to the more straightforwardly criminal Maguires.

But as Frank is released from jail - in for benefit fraud, naturally - and is confronted by an unwanted surprise from Monica, the stage is set for many of the old regulars to return as the Gallaghers feel the push and pull of fractious family relations.

Anne-Marie Duff, Dean Lennox Kelly, Elliott Tittensor, Jody Latham and Kelli Hollis all turn up, but really it's David Threlfall's show to steal. He's never been more nauseating, compelling and heartbreaking as the reprehensible Frank, struggling to face further family responsibility. Will the feckless waster ever appreciate anything more than a party?

It's appropriate that David Threlfall, the one constant of this unfeasibly durable show, steps behind the camera for its final-ever episode. And fun, too, to see Anne-Marie Duff's Fiona joining the likes of Lip (Jody Latham), Kev (Dean Lennox Kelly) and Carl (Elliott Tittensor) in one last doomed attempt to tame the wild beast that is Threlfall's Frank Gallagher.

The plot, for what it's worth, sees most of the Gallagher brood reuniting for funeral so farcical that Fiona determines to take the remaining kids back down south with her. Can Frank, just out of prison and with itchy feet, rediscover a modicum of interest in fatherhood? A couple of half-hearted jokes about Jesus and abortion show that the series hasn't entirely sacrificed its aggressive taboo-busting for cartoonish irrelevance. But this is a shabby, subdued finale to a show that once fizzed with vigour, invention and purpose.

The lower-class heroes of the Chatsworth estate have been providing high-quality entertainment for more than nine years now, but it's finally time to wave farewell to the Gallaghers, the Maguires and the rest as Shameless airs its final episode.

Former cast members Anne-Marie Duff, Dean Lennox Kelly, Elliott Tittensor, Jody Latham and Kelli Hollis all make a reappearance for the Shameless curtain call, as iconic alcoholic Frank Gallagher ends his prison stint for benefit fraud and receives an unwanted surprise from Monica (Annabelle Apison).

The 11th and final series of the cult Mancunian drama arrives. We're promised an epic 14-part run, with many of the departed stars (including Anne-Marie Duff) returning for the finale. In this colourful opener, it's a double celebration on the Chatsworth Estate: the residents have been awarded an Olympic ring from London 2012 (well, sort of), while the Maguire family toast the expansion of their dodgy empire. Meanwhile, Frank Gallagher (the brilliant David Threlfall) has become a school caretaker.

After nine years, Shameless begins its drunken lurch off our screens with the premiere of its 11th and final series this week. The focal point of the first episode is Jamie Maguire (Aaron McCusker), who begins to question himself after making a shocking discovery about his family.

Elsewhere, everyone's favourite pissed-up reprobate Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) continues his transformation into an honest working man... while mingling with some of the area's finest prostitutes. Also, keep an eye out this series for the return of departed Chatsworth favourites such as Monica (Annabelle Apsion) Lip (Jody Latham), Carl (Elliott Tittensor) and Fiona (Anne-Marie Duff), all of whom will be showing their faces before the Shameless final curtain.

Anne-Marie Duff returns for final ever Shameless

The final ever episode of Shameless is currently shooting on the Chatsworth Estate and in true Shameless fashion some much loved characters turn up to sort out Frank in a suitably finale for the blisteringly funny and offbeat drama series.

As the US remake invades our screens, here's a chance to celebrate the more wild, more energetic, and ultimately superior original. Watch real-life lovebirds Anne-Marie Duff and James McAvoy dance a merry dance as Gallagher family linchpin Fiona and her car-nicking boyfriend Steve, and revel in David Threlfall's career-defining turn as drunken philosopher Frank, to which, as yet, Willam H Macy hasn't been able to hold a candle.

How Shameless stars came of age on West End stage

Maxine Peake and Anne-Marie Duff are among many stars whose careers began on the show. And a pair of casting directors were vital to its success, writes Vanessa Thorpe.

It would be unfair to say that Shameless (C4) has grown aimless because it was always about lives that lacked what might be called orthodox direction. When it began in 2004, with a cast that included James McAvoy, Anne-Marie Duff and Maxine Peake, one of the show's obvious charms was a manic, scattergun energy that refused to conform to any preconfigured narrative or moral shape.

Here was the underclass in all its feckless, drunken, irresponsible, irrepressible, resourceful, violent and promiscuous splendour, and there were no homilies or apologies or tales of transforming personal growth. After all the plastic melodramatics on EastEnders, this was a series that revelled in mundane minor victories over an absent landlord state: dole scams, housing benefit fraud, disability swindles.

What's more, in Frank Gallagher we heard the slurring, finger-jabbing voice of Asbo Britain. He was an antihero for our times, rat-like in his cunning and rat-arsed in his habits, a man whose waywardness made Yosser Hughes seem like Alan Partridge. Frank was a brilliant creation, not just emblematically but in terms of the story itself. His chronic dysfunction lent a tragicomic grandeur to the Chatsworth Estate.

The anticonscience is a tough act to maintain, however, and after seven years Frank's no longer just a drunken bore. He has also become boring. The show has come to rely on his ranting dereliction as a kind of dramatic prop, a lifeless symbol of continuity, like Ena Sharples's hairnet. And as Frank has become louder and more obnoxious, the other characters have also been sucked into caricature.

Last week the first five episodes of the new series played out on consecutive nights in a story that had Frank appearing in a variety of classic film and TV settings - Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Dr Who - but it turned out that he was drugged up in a psychiatric unit, where he'd been sectioned by his ex-wife Monica.

Yet even within the "reality" of the mental hospital, the film-makers couldn't resist pastiching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with Frank recreating Jack Nicholson's role as the rebel patient Randle McMurphy. In fact all five episodes were awash with hallucinations and dream sequences, a disorienting prospect at the best of times, but deadeningly exhausting over the course of a week. It was as though jumping the shark - the moment at which a long-running TV series collapses into absurdity - had been turned into a marathon sport.

Everything about the new series - from the surreal film references to the relentlessly transgressive plotlines and the coarse, preachy tone - spoke of a frantic desperation to be meaningful. In seeking to demonstrate an urgent sense of purpose, Shameless may not have lost its aim, but it has lost its point.