Hands down one of the best episodes this series, we open with a drunk Frank (no, really) staggering around a darkened and deserted Manchester Art Gallery, the reason for which is explained in retrospect. The Gallagher residence had mistakenly been allocated to another family on account of the council receiving no rent for the past 6 years and assuming it was empty. The resulting visit from the social started off badly, with a drunken Frank (seriously) being dragged back into the middle of the interview by Yvonne, but appeared to take a turn for the better when he sobered up and started pretending to be perfect.

But when the social worker “befriends” Debbie and suggests she has a night out, and on that night out Liam is left looking after baby Stella, she’s very quick on the draw in taking both Liam and Stella into care. Debbie feels betrayed, but not half as betrayed as she feels when Frank tells her “Fiona would’ve kept it together.” The devastating effect of letting that slip out reaches even Frank’s befuddled neurons, so he deals with it the only way he knows how: by going on another enormous bender. Which is how he ends up in the Art Gallery, sharing a quarter bottle of vodka with a Polish security guard and not only coming out with the line of the episode – “should I roll over and play Dad?” – but also finally finding the truth of the old saying: in vino veritas. “You may be fine without me,” he mutters to his (absent) children, “but I’m f**ked without you.”

Shameless – still one of the few dramas that can switch from belly laugh to full-on pathos in a matter of seconds and leaving you mentally gasping for air.

That fine upstanding fellow Joe has decided to press charges against Mimi, but tells Mandy he’ll drop them if she gets back together with him. This blatant blackmail gives Mickey the chance for an uncharacteristically macho outburst at a family meeting in the gents’ toilet at the Jockey, and also leads up to what should have been the subtitle of this episode – “The Maguires go Visiting” – as a long line of Maguire visitors turn up at Joe’s bedside, each with their own brand of threat: knife, poison, shotgun, fatal injection. Brilliantly and hilariously reminiscent of the face-slapping scene from Airplane! but very Maguire at the same time. Joe appears suitably chastised, but will he bounce back to his usual violent self once he’s had time to think about it?

There’s another fine upstanding fellow on the Chatsworth estate this week – young Chesney, who joins his mates in an unexpected MILF riding adventure with the insatiable Lorna, whose taxi-driver husband works a permanent night shift. This plot rattles off more laughs than the whole of the rest of this week’s show, including the extreme case of the hair trigger, the latex allergy, and the post-reveal pondering between the boys about why, if Lorna was only trying to get pregnant, did she engage in… umm… thingy. You know. The other. And that, too.

After the almost total dearth of laughs in recent weeks as we’ve played out a few Maguire-related dark stories, it came as a refreshing change this week to enjoy several belly laughs and multiple chuckles at the clever pen of writer Paul Tomalin. Excellent stuff.