Grow up! Cold Feet’s ageing Jack the Lads are creepy, not adorable
Everything that gets on my wick about Cold Feet (itv) was summed up in the moment when John thomson’s character, cabbie Pete, arrived at court for jury service in his best suit and tie.
One of the other jurors gave him a sidelong look as he volunteered to be foreman, and whispered: ‘teacher’s pet!’
the sight of these 50-somethings pretending to be schoolchildren makes my skin crawl. Any sane adult’s reaction to that kind of playground name-calling would be baffled hilarity.
But Pete looked hurt and wobbly- lipped, as though the insult had cut him to his sensitive soul. the man is meant to be a taxi driver, for heaven’s sake. he must hear worse on the roads 50 times a day.
i know we’re supposed to adore Pete and his mates for their eternally youthful spirit. But there’s nothing adorable about the sight of five people old enough to be grandparents, who throw tantrums and wallow in self-pity, while sharing gossip about their immature love affairs.
Last week, Adam and David ( James nesbitt and robert Bathurst) had a scrap in a pub carpark, rolling around on the tarmac while the women shrieked at them. Shouldn’t they have grown out of that in their teens?
Creepier still, Adam was disciplined at work for ‘inappropriate behaviour’. i suppose the storyline was meant to highlight how comments that once were treated as banter are now deemed harassment.
What Adam did, though, went far beyond jokey flirting. Overhearing a woman saying something about sex in the Far east, he rushed across the room to start a monologue about 19th-century Japanese porn. that is the office equivalent of throwing open his dirty mackintosh and flashing.
When Cold Feet began in 1997, there was some justification for these suburban Peter Pans, getting older but never wiser. they were in their 30s, grappling with the challenges of adulthood and pining for their youth.
Almost a quarter of a century on, there’s no excuse for it. When Jack the Lad has wrinkles and bifocals, he’s turned into Paul the Perv.
it’s true that this series has deftly handled the aftermath of cancer treatment for Jen (Fay ripley). television rarely bothers showing how people cope after beating the disease into remission.
But that just makes the show more frustrating. if it can get this one thing right, why is so much of the rest plain wrong?
Let’s face it, for the average bloke in his 50s, the birds he wants to chase are the ones without a tick beside their name in his ornithologist’s handbook.
it was in this spirit, vet Peter Wright, who was once James herriot’s apprentice, went in search of gannets on Wild Animal Rescue (C5). Magazine programmes about British wildlife are a sure hit, never more than at this time of year when we’re all waiting for spring. the sight of 35,000 pairs of gannets on the cliffs between Bridlington and Scarborough was breathtaking — especially when we learned that, 80 years ago, the birds were down to just one nesting pair. What a comeback.
Outside inverness, two Scottish wildcats were being encouraged to breed like gannets. Wildcats, unlike domestic moggies, produce just one litter a year, and the female, Laura, wasn’t in the mood last time. no wonder her mate Fergus scowled at the camera with his ears flat, hissing furiously at his keeper.
Fergus, you should call yourself very grumpy Cat and release a youtube video. you’re born to be a meme.