Television - Andrew Billen on the return of Cold Feet and The Royle Family
"With off-beat rhythm - ten letters," asked David on Sunday night's Cold Feet. The twittish public schoolboy (a remarkably believable caricature from Robert Bathurst) finds it difficult not to voice aloud his smallest worries, although, to be fair, completing the crossword is one task that comes relatively easily to him. "Syncopated," he answered triumphantly.
Cold Feet (9.30pm, ITV) is syncopated comedy-drama. It is of varied pace, gearlessly moves from fun to pathos, winds back and replays its favourite bits and teasingly delays its plot resolutions by indulging lavish fantasies about them. It is a soap opera. And yet it has the finish of a work of art.
This week Pete (played with morose stoicism by John Thomson) looked through his straying wife's diary and, as he flicked through, Jenny's life flashed forward and back and then paused on the terrible moment she was kissed by his best friend, the guileless Lothario, Adam. Jenny and Adam's kiss, relayed via cordless telephone back to Pete, was a comedy prop gag to match David Jason's fall through the invisible bar on Only Fools and Horses - except this was more painful: the twist to the knife that Jenny (the wonderful Fay Ripley) had inserted the week before when, in answer to one of Pete's simple-minded inquiries about her thoughts, replied: "I think I don't love you anymore."
Beneath the narrative tricks and mood changes three perfectly straightforward stories about three straightforward couples are being told. After all, writer Mike Bullen left us last year with a paternity cliff-hanger almost as old as soap itself. Was Rachel (Helen Baxendale) carrying Adam's baby or wasn't she? By episode two Adam (the roguish James Nesbitt) was in the full throes of post-partem mania, having discovered that the baby had been aborted. Oscillating between mourning the child that might have been (and might have been his) and celebrating his narrow escape, Adam has embarked on a meaningless sexual relationship with a girl called Amy and a more meaningful one with her best friend, also called Rachel. (Such nominal duplication happens in real life, so why not in art, which can use a little confusion now and again?) So when Rachel I (Baxendale) turns up at his door with a heavily rehearsed speech of reconciliation, Amy and Rachel II are both on the staircase in their flimsies. It'll be hard for Rachel I to forgive Adam. In fact, it'll be hard for all of us. We are not so much angry as terribly, terribly disappointed.
No one, however, need be disappointed with this second series of Cold Feet, for it amply justifies Bullen and his producer Christine Langham's hunch that of the travails of commitment-shy thirtysomethings there is no end. At the Edinburgh Television Festival in August, BBC1's controller Peter Salmon generously named it as the ITV programme he most coveted. He has at least been able to thieve from BBC2 Caroline Aherne's extraordinary The Royle Family (10pm Thursdays). This supposedly difficult yet single-premise comedy - an inarticulate working-class family talks to itself while watching television - has confounded doubters by drawing audiences of seven million, which proves that BBC1 audiences don't, after all, need a laughter track in order to spot a joke.
Impressively, for we who loved the Royles from the start, Aherne and Craig Cash, who write the scripts and also play the vixen Denise and her gormless husband Dave, have overcome the problem of how to stretch this slender sitcom redux into a second series. They are colouring the old jokes in darker hues.
Sue Johnston's Barbara is still obsessed with what people have for dinner, but now we realise, as she sweats over the cooker, she is menopausal. Jim, her husband (Ricky Tomlinson), remains fascinated by his bowel movements - a preoccupation that surfaces in his favourite insult, "My arse!" - but his lavatorial humour is becoming less tolerant, more exasperated. Denise can still do no wrong in the family's eyes, yet we can now tut-tut that her selfishness extends to neglecting her unborn baby. Her younger brother, Anthony, without whom no tea would ever be brewed in the house, is still regarded as intrinsically lazy but, having gained a girlfriend and the management of a rock band, he is clearly about to make his bid for freedom. Meanwhile, as his in-laws' personalities deepen, it is Dave's tragedy to remain as one-dimensional as ever. At parenting class, Denise is asked to describe her husband. "I said about the discos and removals he does," she reports. "There isn't much more to say about him."
All director Steve Bendelack must watch are the length of the speech pauses (they must never sound Pinteresque) and the way in which his camera free-associates - this week it roamed not from face to face but from chocolate biscuit to chocolate biscuit. We do not want this thing looking like a movie from Dogme 95. But for now The Royle Family is enjoying a deserved heyday. Cold Feet may celebrate the arrhythmia of the romantic heart but, as the Royles potter back and forth to the toilet, they beat perfect time to the dead rhythm of everyday life.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
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