Television - Andrew Billen on the filthy language, nudity and sexual perversion of mates turning 40

The three-hour drama 40 wasn't what I feared it would be. Shown over three nights on Channel 4 (8-10 April), it was promoted as a new thing, part of a trend for televising midlife crises, the kind you get once your Dawson's Creek and Cold Feet crises are behind you. The realisation that at 40, most of the grains of sand have probably fallen through the egg-timer of a man's life should provoke interesting thoughts. Unfortunately, on television, these are usually no more fascinating than "Phwoar, look at that bird" and "Me want a Harley-Davidson". As for fortysomething women, on TV they don't have crises at all, unless they are really silly, like Patsy and Edina. When was the last time you saw a drama about the female menopause, the one that actually exists?

But 40 was just a marketing man's title for a very strange piece of writing by Bryan Elsley. It is true that the main characters were all 40, having been at school somewhere near Bristol in the late Seventies. It is true, too, that the younger characters were allowed to scold the 40-year-olds knowingly ("You're a fucking idiot, aren't you? Can we get a takeaway?"). It is also the case that the lead character, Ralph, had to be injected with testosterone before he was able to ejaculate. But, frankly, this lot would have had problems at any age.

Eddie Izzard was wildly miscast as Ralph. Izzard is an intriguing actor because he always sounds as if he is improvising, but here he was required to play a macho bastard and he couldn't. Too feminine and too playful, he could not convince us that everyone would hate him as much as they did. Ralph began the series believing the greatest tragedy of his life was turning 40, a landmark he celebrated by standing bollock-naked on the roof of his bachelor pad near King's Cross in London. By the end he knew real despair, his career in advertising ruined by newspaper revelations that the pubescent model he had hired for a bra campaign (who happened to be a friend's daughter) was 15 rather than 18.

But next to his old school chum Robert (Hugo Speer), Ralph was relatively stable. Robert brought a female political asylum-seeker into his family home not out of charity, but because he was turned on by the scars that covered her body. His motives were easily discovered by his wife, Maggie (Kerry Fox), because she knew what he really liked to do in bed was not cunnilingus, as she told a friend, but rape. By a happy coincidence, his regular mistress - his wife's best friend, Jess (Joanne Whalley) - was also covered with scars, although how she got them was never explained. By a further (but, for Robert, less happy) coincidence, both refugee and mistress did their bit to kill him.

You felt sorry for Maggie, but even sorrier for Jess's husband Ken (Vincent Regan) who, although he sported a modest scar on his chin, had not been to the school of the damned that the rest had. As he slowly realised that his wife was having an affair with Robert, he was confronted with the news that she had breast cancer. Actually she didn't. It was simply Jess's funny old way of leaving him.

Anita (Nimmy March) was the nearest the drama got to producing a heroine. Yet even she was a recovering drug abuser. She represented hope, however, and had finally succeeded in getting pregnant, this time by the good offices of Gregory (Mark Benton), known at school for obvious reasons as "Tubby". Initially, this seemed rather romantic, as Tubby had had an adolescent crush on Anita. Unfortunately, it transpired that his actual sexual preference was for men, and one young black man in particular whom Anita happened to meet at an NA meeting.

So 40 had more coincidences than a Dickens novel. Its dramatic texture was also extraordinarily uneven. One moment, we were meant to be laughing in a Cold Feet sort of way at Ralph's sports car being vandalised; the next, we were witnessing scenes of graphic sexual violence. The language was filthy and the nudity uninhibited, male and female. Yet there were cutie-pie moments - for instance, Amy, the 15-year-old, dancing to pop music on a boat shed and Ralph decking out the school swimming pool in lights.

The acting was fine, or more than fine, but even Kerry Fox didn't know how to deliver one line: "I haven't slept much lately, what with my husband having been stabbed to death and leaving me without a penny in the world and my daughter evolving into a fully formed porn star in the national press." She wisely inserted a half-laugh into the middle of that one.

It was all so odd and unlikely that one's interest quickly turned to making sense of the narrative and working out how, with its frequent time shifts and recapitulations, it fitted together. It did, rather beautifully. It was easy in comparison deciding whether the seven 40-year-olds were representative examples of their generation's midlife crises, or merely lunatics. There must have been something in the school milk.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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