I wasn’t too sure about the “talking baby” but thankfully since its first spurt that particular character has taken a back seat while the rest of Shameless hits its stride big time. The third episode opened with Frank getting arrested. Nothing unusual about that, you might think, and you’d be completely wrong. This time. Turns out he’s been a victim of identity theft and his entire criminal record has been wiped. But before he has chance to celebrate this amazing stroke of luck, Stan and Tom reveal the flipside to the news. Frank is now eligible for jury service and his police buddies are more than happy to deliver him to court. Being Frank, it takes him less than a day to work out a way to turn this to his advantage.

Having managed to avoid even the thought of jury service all his life, Frank wasn’t aware he could claim expenses for attending. That’s all it takes for him to spin out the jury’s deliberations over several days in a wonderful homage to 12 Angry Men that sees Frank, as the only juror who “believes” the accused is innocent, argue eloquently for his release, along with taking the troops out of Iraq, solving the credit crisis, combating global warming, and just about any other argument that will secure him another day’s worth of expenses. In the end, with all but two jurors convinced and faced with the imminent end of the trial, Frank changes his mind and begins to argue the other way. Brilliant.

As always, the humour in Shameless is not restricted to the main stories, or characters, It’s spread about across a wide spectrum of sub-plots. The one that gave me most laughs this week was one of the most minor subplots – the discovery of a skeleton in the pub that Norma believed to be that of a baby, when in fact it was a cat. Sounds gruesome but in the hands of writer Jimmy Dowdall it was an endless source of short, sharp chuckles.

Mickey Maguire discovered a rather unlikely talent for writing extreme erotica, much to the delight of several people including Carrie, who gets much more than she bargained for when she finds herself stuck in a floor, handcuffed to Mickey. Now, if he could only read his stories in Russian too, Carrie would *never* come down off the ceiling.

Pundits regularly announce the death of Shameless, or hark back to the “golden days” of series 1-3. Series six may have got off to a relatively slow start but I’d say on the evidence so far it still manages to be as fresh, original and downright whacky as it ever was. And let’s face it, even if it was slipping a bit, second-class Shameless is still in a class of its own, and better than most anything else you’ll find on the box.