In an age of austerity, Cold Feet’s extravagance is utterly ludicrous

Wouldn’t it be lovely to live in the fantasy world of Cold Feet (ItV)? I don’t mean the saccharin friendships or the asbestos livers, handy though they would be. I mean the dosh.

Money appears as naturally as rain showers in Cold Feet. look at that house Adam (James nesbitt) owns: it’s filled with more marble and polished glass than trump tower.

When he and miserable girlfriend tina (leanne Best) take a saucy soak together, in a bath the size of a yacht, they are surrounded by hundreds of flickering candles. It’s so opulent, tina is wearing a full face of make-up the whole time.

their lodger david (Robert Bathurst) is supposedly skint, but he drives a BMW and orders whole outfits of designer clothes online with one flick of his credit card.

there are a couple of possible explanations. Maybe Cold Feet is really a money-laundering operation, controlled by the Russian mafia. It’s designed to waste colossal sums, for tax purposes.

or alternatively, Cold Feet is trapped in a nineties bubble, before the banking crash and the credit crunch. that’s certainly where it belongs — in the past.

the original show was a masterpiece of whimsy and make-believe. We wanted to inhabit a universe with names like Amazing and Fantastic universe.

Bryan Cranston, hugely acclaimed as the drugs baron Walter White in Breaking Bad, has spent the past four years producing a ten-part series based on PKd’s early tales.

these are the ones that made his reputation, long before movie blockbusters such as Blade Runner and total Recall. the first of these, Electric Dreams (C4), imagined a British city gripped by riots, after new laws repealed all rights to privacy.

Half the length of a Hollywood movie, this was the ideal format for fast-paced story-telling that didn’t become bogged down in dead-end subplots or faux emotional journeys. Holliday Grainger, who is also starring in Strike on BBC1, plays a young mutant, Honor, who is coerced into working for the police, using her telepathic powers to invade the minds of terrorists.

She looks inside the thoughts of her police partner Agent Ross (Richard Madden) and sees memories bathed in yellow and green, the colours of an idyllic rural childhood.

the same colours illuminate the cityscape, but now they are lurid and nightmarish. It is visually stunning.

Inevitably, because this was a PKd invention, all logic dissolved by the end. But unlike Cold Feet, his stories make more sense today than ever before.