Abbott also wrote episodes of Coronation Street and Cracker

Paul Abbott criticised Footballers' Wives for "regressing to lower standards" while praising US show Lost for setting "a new benchmark".

He told the Royal Television Society's Cambridge convention: "We need more drama that shows a world we don't know, to take us places we've never been."

Abbott won three prizes at this year's Royal Television Society awards.

Before writing Channel 4 series Shameless, Abbott wrote for TV shows including crime series Cracker, Coronation Street and State of Play.

"There is a malaise in television drama at the moment," he said.

"I've written for TV for 22 years and know it doesn't have to be like this."

He said the "commonest excuse" given for drama being "bland or inoffensive or just crap" was that a TV audience could not "assimilate complex storytelling".

Abbott's Shameless follows an anarchic Manchester family

"This is just patronising," Abbott said. "Audiences today can handle as much as you can throw at them."

He said there was "nothing wrong" with ITV making a show such as Footballers' Wives, "except that the subject matter from the title alone says it's not to be taken seriously".

"Women called Chardonnay, with hermaphrodite babies, that's pretty funny," he added.

"Funny if it were designed as froth and only cost as much. Not funny when you think it actually cost as much to make as the entire last series of Cracker."

Abbott said drama should reflect society, "but not so literally that we might as well just stand at a bus stop and get the same gig".

Abbott said Footballers' Wives was not to be taken seriously

"We need more drama that unpeels society, that roots through the cubbyholes to fetch us nuggets of human behaviour that opens our eyes a bit," he added.

"Not just the dark stuff - wondrous fragments of ordinary people that can take our breath away."

He said Channel 4's defunct soap Brookside "made the fatal error of boosting its ratings with ballistic storylines that were wilfully incongruous to its landscape".

"The audience deserves, and I believe craves, much more protein in their diet," Abbott concluded.

"Only by giving the viewer a workout, making them join the dots, use their own imagination, can we reclaim television drama as the challenging, exciting, life-changing medium that I and many others have known it to be."

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