Having given Abbott two awards for the series, the host Kate Thornton then summoned the writer back to the stage for a special honour, the RTS Judges' Award, for "his high-voltage energy, youthful disrespect for the obvious and a bravura ability to speak the unspeakable".For once, Abbott, a dramatist of extraordinary energy and work-rate, was rendered, by his own admission, "absolutely speechless". I hope this campaign raises awareness of Breast Cancer Care's services."Breast Cancer Care: .uk, helpline 0808 800 6000. The television series Shameless was recognised last week as the finest such show of last year - but we'll never know if it would have had the same impact had it been called Brendan. That was the title the writer Paul Abbott gave to the project he submitted to BBC Birmingham in the late 1990s, only to withdraw it because he was unhappy that the partly autobiographical piece didn't quite hit the spot. He issued a written statement saying he was "delighted" to have had the opportunity to take part."I have always admired Simon Dickett's work," he wrote, "and thought this was the perfect opportunity to work alongside him as it's for a worthy cause. He's very receptive and understands what you are talking about.

For someone so talented, he's unusually respectful to people around him. Sometimes people can be a bit prima donna-ish."Leigh suggested only one change to the script, a piece of repetition that gave emphasis. Dicketts says: "He said, 'It's your thing and I'm anxious it comes out how you want it.'"Will Leigh be prepared to do any more commercial work? The experience does not seem to have set him against it. Dicketts says that such editing gave the commercial (which is running until 6 April and is allied to newspaper ads) the "right intensity and cadence". He says: "You should feel afterwards that everyone who appears means every word of it - it's like a manifesto."Working with Mike Leigh, he says, was a two-way process "It's a very short line of communication. The best thing is that you can be on a beach or in a pub - you can be online everywhere - and you can enjoy better scenery But it is another tool for media enslavement.". The stars arriving to be filmed at a small London production house were "stacked up like aeroplanes coming into land", recalls Simon Dicketts, executive creative director of advertising agency M&C Saatchi.

I'd always wanted to be an actress but I'd never thought of being a broadcaster. He started suggesting things: there was a programme for writers and he started getting me to read out stories on the air. You see some very raw emotions."It is no mean feat to persuade the director of such authentic and uncompromising work as High Hopes, Life Is Sweet and Secrets & Lies to dip his foot into ad land and make a commercial. He allows actors to be very naturalistic and gets them in the right mood and lets them get on with it. "I chose him because he's simply the best person I could think of to do it - we needed it to be very honest," he says."I saw Vera Drake the other day It's so haunting. All of them queuing up to make a television advert and none of them getting paid.But more exciting for Dicketts than working with any of these celebrities was the presence of the man standing behind the camera, the Bafta award-winning film director Mike Leigh.When Dicketts embarked on putting together an ad campaign for the charity Breast Cancer Care, he had only one individual in mind to direct the commercial. It's quite easy, because you could be sitting anywhere doing work that is quite interesting - more and more work can be spent out of the office with your BlackBerry The other side is that you're a slave to technology You're on call all the time, but you can deal with things Its global reach also makes it more efficient.