A wave of warmth at seeing old friends 13 years on
SOME things don’t change. It’s been 13 years, but Pete still hero-worships Adam. Clever Karen is still too nice for her own good. And Cold Feet (ITV) – back for an eight-part relaunch – is still the best in its class, a silly romantic comedy that’s shot through with pain and grief.
American TV has been excelling at these lightweight, ensemble dramas for years, ever since Thirtysomething in the Eighties, but Mike Bullen’s show set in Manchester and debuting in 1997 was the first time that British television got the format just right.
Largely that’s due to perfect casting. Charmer Adam is a selfish pain-in-the-bottom, and James Nesbitt still plays him as though he doesn’t even have to act.
Bumbling Pete forever expects and accepts the worst, rather like actor John Thomson, the forgotten man of The Fast Show, who admits he was on his way to audition for panto when he heard Cold Feet was coming back.
Posh Hermione Norris is utterly believable as supercilious, soft-hearted Karen, while her ex David is played by Robert Bathurst, a man so born for dimwit aristo roles that even his name sounds like a stately home.
Then there’s Fay Ripley, who has been playing hospital matrons and police inspectors since leaving Cold Feet in 2001 – just the sort of competent, bossy jobs you’d expect her character Jenny to do.
They’re all older, of course, and mostly in their fifties now, but not so very different.
Their children, on the other hand, are unrecognisable – the toddlers of the original series are teens now, smoking dope and fancying each other at weddings.
The ageing process gives Bullen a chance to weave a melancholic thread through the narrative, which had widower Adam returning from Singapore with a fiancee who’scheapstag night, lager18 yearsandthe self- prawnhis styled junior.balls ‘Threeon Over his Amigos’,Feet, reflectedthe elderly glumly on lads theirof Cold midlife disappointments.
‘I’m not happy,’ David confessed. ‘I have little fleeting moments ... maybe in middle age that’s the best we can hope for.’ One of the great pleasures of being fiftysomething, of course, is feeling sorry for yourself. It’s so much less exhausting than being cheerful. But the story didn’t stay downbeat for long.
There were typical bursts of knockabout comedy, like the moment when Adam, in the minicab he has borrowed from taxi driver Pete, is mistaken for a cabbie. His fare, naturally, turns out to be his new landlady, who lives across the hall – Adam might be engaged, but he can never be surrounded by too many smitten women.
The plot sometimes strayed into sheer fantasy. Angela ( Karen David) was the daughter of an Asian billionaire, a Muslim businessman who seemed entirely happy to see his daughter, and her fortune, spliced to an English ne’er-do-well almost twice her age.
He didn’t even object when the ceremony was hurriedly held in a half-empty church with none of his own family or associates there. Who knew Far East oligarchs were so laid back?
This kind of whimsy was a trait of the original show, but it feels naive now – perhaps because lost innocence is one of the debits of ageing. We ceased long ago to believe in Father Christmas and Asian billionaires.
That’s easy to overlook, however. Cold Feet is a show to be enjoyed for the emotions it evokes: the over-riding one was a wave of warmth at meeting old friends, people we thought we’d never see again. And that’s what middle age feels like.