Shameless scam or broadsheet bullshit?

This recent idea - apparently spawned in the Telegraph - that the “disappearance” of Shannon Matthews was a scam based on an episode of Shameless has the feel of a stupid newsroom joke that’s got out of hand.

What actually happened in the episode in question was that Frank Gallagher, the series’ drunken, drug-addled patriarch, claimed to have won the lottery but in reality had lost the ticket after puking over the floor of the newsagent. His daughter, Debbie, realised her dad wasn’t really a millionaire and, in order to smoke out Frank’s lie before her mum spunked all the non-existent cash, faked the kidnap of her kid brother Liam and got a friend to call Frank demanding ransom. Eventually Liam turned up down the road after enjoying a bonding session around a makeshift campfire with his father.

To spell this out, then:

• In Shameless, there was a local lottery “winner”, who turned out not to have won the lottery. In the Shannon Matthews case, the lottery was not involved
• In Shameless, the kidnapped child’s teenage sister orchestrated a fake kidnap to extract a fake £500,000 ransom from her father. In Shannon Matthews’ case, no ransom was demanded from anyone, let alone the child’s father, and certainly not for £500,000 (although someone from Dewsbury did, apparently, approach the family of Madeleine McCann, asking for money)
• In Shameless, the kidnapped child spent time with his father during his “disappearance”. This did not happen in the Shannon case, as far as we know
• In Shameless, the kidnapped child was being looked after by his teenage sister a few doors away. In the Shannon case, the child was found with her step-father’s 39-year-old uncle a mile away.

Shameless is a comedy drama that plays on the tension between its mundane setting - a deprived Manchester housing estate - and the hyper-real situations its characters orchestrate for themselves. Frank, for example, is a semi-lucid ghetto philosopher with a vague resemblance to Jesus who always orders an E with his pint of lager. It is not a docu-soap.

Perhaps the Telegraph thinks all council estates north of Watford are populated by people like the Gallaghers and these semi-hallucinogenic storylines are an accurate portrayal of everyday life in places like Dewsbury.

No-one involved in the investigation has publicly mentioned Shameless (have they?) yet the idea of linking an actual, real, troubled working-class family with one depicted in a fantastical TV comedy is too easy to resist. Consequently, the Shameless connection has spread all over the place (Times, Sun, Daily Record, Metro, Daily Mail, BBC radio and TV, etc, etc) without anyone bothering to properly analyse the claim. (According to the Sun, police have “asked for a tape” of the episode in question, which may or may not be true.)

Presumably the Telegraph’s journalists are scouring the Radio Times as we speak, trying to link Gordon Brown’s decision not to attend the opening of the Olympics in Beijing with the return of Ricky and Bianca in EastEnders. And tomorrow they will no doubt have a feature arguing that Margaret Thatcher’s monetarist economic policies bear a “striking resemblance” to the first series of Bagpuss. It’s the only language us broadsheet readers understand…

Some observations about media coverage of Shannon Matthews at Anorak News.

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