[3] Abbott was raped by a stranger at the age of 11, leading to him jumping from the roof of a multi-story car park in an attempt to take his own life.

[3] On his release, he was taken into foster care and placed with a much more settled working-class family, where having two parents who held steady employment and owned a television and car was a new experience for him.

[4] He enrolled at the University of Manchester in 1980 to study psychology, but decided to leave to concentrate on writing when a radio play he wrote was accepted by the BBC.

A contact knew the address of the leading British dramatist Alan Bennett who, after seeing his script, was of the opinion that Abbott had written a perfectly acceptable piece of work which he would be happy to endorse.

In 1988, he co-wrote his first televised drama script, a one-off play for the Dramarama anthology, with fellow Coronation Street writer Kay Mellor.

2002 saw Abbott experimenting with a new genre when he wrote the political thriller State of Play, which was directed by David Yates and produced for the BBC by Hilary Bevan-Jones.

In late 2003, Abbott and Bevan-Jones founded their own independent production company, Tightrope Pictures, based in Soho, London.

[6][2] In early 2004, Channel 4 screened Shameless, a new Abbott series very loosely based on his experiences and family life growing up in Burnley,[7] although the action of the programme itself was changed to Manchester in the present day.

His November 2006 lecture at Salford entitled "The 21st Century Box" explored how media is changing and provided "first aid for British television makers".