I’m half way through watching Clocking Off, and it’s interesting seeing what Paul Abbott is doing here that not enough writers are doing elsewhere. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it ran on BBC1 in 2000, and consists of six self-contained dramas, Abbott’s sneaky way of bringing back the single play to television. Each story is set in and around the world created by Mackintosh Textiles and its employees, and features a stellar cast of names you’ll recognise from Dr Who to Life on Mars, stopping by at Coronation Street and Queer as Folk.

What’s immediately clear is that Abbott has a knack for coming up with stories that get to the heart of his characters’ lives. The stories they’re caught up in are without a doubt the biggest things that are happening to them, then and maybe ever. A man who’s been missing for more than a year comes home to his family with amnesia to discover he spent the missing time with another wife and child. A woman sets her house on fire to ensure her partner sees none of the money from it, and finds unexpected love with her next door neighbour. A teenager with learning difficulties has an affair with his boss’s wife.

There’s an epic scale to the emotions underpinning the stories, which ensures the stories are much more than soap opera. You come to know and care about these characters pretty quickly, partly through what’s at stake for them, also because there’s a lightness of touch brought to the dialogue which stops the scripts being Heavy With Significance. It feels like actual people talking, and they’re just as tongue-tied as the rest of us when it comes to grappling with the huge stories they’re caught up in.

What with Paul Abbott being the man who brought us Shameless, you can expect recognisable social worlds and people who behave like human beings, not as pawns representative of their class or theories based on some or other psychological text. And, like Frank Gallagher, some of these characters have their say at length, which feels fine and natural when most of the script features short exchanges of dialogue. One lesson from that is don’t be afraid to let your characters talk about what matters to them sometimes: why let Alan Bennett have the monopoly on monologues?

Another lesson is harder to quantify. In the third story, teenage K.T. is besotted with his lover, the factory boss’s wife. And the factory boss knocks K.T. over with his car, hospitalising him. Only, the boss doesn’t at this point realise that it’s K.T. having the affair. So, Abbott has got him to do what’s expected in a situation like this – put his wife’s lover in hospital…but without realising that he is her lover. There’s karma there, which is dramatically satisfying, but ignorance of the truth makes the situation far more interesting than had the situation been done by the book, with the boss punching the lad’s lights out for messing with his missus. There are other neat twists and turns that have similar effect: the boss loses it with his foreman, who he suspects of being his wife’s lover…which he was on a previous occasion, but is no longer, meaning that he’s both innocent and guilty at the same time. Good stuff, dramatically.

Those kind of nuances are typical of the scenarios that Abbott contrives. A man falls for his neighbour and her kids, and wants them to be part of his life – only she doesn’t want to be responsible to any man, even one she does love. They reach a happy compromise by a circuitous path, which makes their credible ending that much more satisfying.

That quality of reaching a conclusion only though trials and misfortunes, some of them age-old, others relevant to the society we live in now, is characteristic of Paul Abbott’s work. And helps explain why he’s a key figure in modern British television drama, and I’m sure will remain so for years to come.