Daily Mail

So THAT’S why it’s called Cold Feet: the show has rigor mortis

- CHRISTOPHE­R STEVENS

Few sights are more depressing than a row of Hell’s Angels ‘hogs’ in the car park of a service station. Inside, the white- haired bikers have swapped their chrome handlebars for walking frames and are hobbling to queue for the gents.

Once, dolly birds clung on as they rode pillion. Now, if there’s a girl on the back of the bike, she’ll be a carer.

Cold Feet (ITV) is like that. It used to be youthful and rebellious. These days it’s just awkward.

‘I don’t wanna grow old, I’m not ready to,’ wailed James Nesbitt as Adam. His eyebrows were so arched and black, it looked like he had a Victorian railway viaduct painted on his forehead.

widower Adam has been chatting up younger women for years, and as the series returned he excelled himself — panting over a coffeeshop barista without realising that she was actually going out with his teenage son. Isn’t that hilarious? And not the least bit creepy.

Usually when we meet characters like Adam in TV dramas, they have a basement lined in plastic sheeting where they dissect their victims while listening to Mahler.

His best mates Jen and Pete (Fay Ripley and John Thomson) were interrupte­d in a lay-by by a traffic copper while having sex on the front seat of a car. They seemed to think this confirmed they were young and fun-loving — but when you do that in your 50s, it’s called something else . . .

Adam and Pete still meet up most nights for a few pints with their mate David (Robert Bathurst), who is bankrupt but can somehow afford a round of drinks at 20 quid a throw.

we’re meant to believe their boozing is normal behaviour. The reality is, it’s as horrible as discoverin­g that Rick, Vyvyan and Neil the Hippy from The Young Ones are still getting together on a Friday night to trash a curry house and throw up in the municipal flower beds.

Nothing ever changes in the world of Cold Feet. every episode we get the surreal dream sequences and the laboured jokes, unaltered in two decades. The real reason those feet are cold is that the whole show is a rigid corpse.

If the gang were behaving awkwardly, their antics were nothing compared with the reaction of Springwatc­h’s Chris Packham when he encountere­d physicist Albert einstein’s favourite jacket, on Icons (BBC2).

Pressing his face against the decaying leather, Chris inhaled deeply. ‘we naturalist­s have a keen sense of smell,’ he declared. einstein, apparently, smelled of tobacco and sweat.

This eccentric history series is not to be taken too seriously. In each episode, a presenter trots through four famous biographie­s of scientists, politician­s or artists, and invites us to vote on who was the greatest.

Trying to decide whether Marie Curie made a greater contributi­on to science than Alan Turing is a strange sort of beauty contest, with no right answer. But the format allows us to celebrate great men and women, while learning about others who are unjustly ignored — I confess I’d never heard of the Nobel prize-winning researcher Tu Youyou, who helped develop a medicine to fight malaria.

The rules weren’t consistent. we were encouraged to treat Marie Curie’s tempestuou­s private life as irrelevant, while Turing earned bonus points for being hounded to death over his secret homosexual­ity.

But the trumped-up competitio­n provided a good excuse to re-examine these lives, and Chris displayed his usual gift for setting out complex arrays of facts in a clear, easy-to-follow style. As a storytelle­r, he’s not to be sniffed at.

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