Cold comfort for fortysomethings

'Life Begins' stars Claire Skinner (left), Stuart McQuarrie and Caroline Quentin.

English actress Caroline Quentin never watched Cold Feet, so, when she met Mike Bullen, the creator of hugely popular thirtysomething saga to discuss his latest project, Life Begins, she recalls she "kept nodding sagely about Cold Feet. But, as he talked more about the characters — Jules and Chris and Maurice and Sandra, or whatever they're called — he suddenly stopped in his tracks and said, 'You haven't seen it, have you?' "I just laughed merrily and said, 'I'll have the salmon, please'."

Quentin must be one of the few people in Britain who has not sat glued to Cold Feet. When it came to a tear-stained close last year, more than 10 million Britons were hooked on Bullen's serial.

Bullen's latest series is a bittersweet drama that centres on Maggie (played by Quentin), a woman on the cusp of 40 who seems quite content with her lot as a wife and mother of two.

Then her husband, Phil (Alexander Armstrong), announces he is leaving her. As she contemplates a lonely life of unfixed taps and precious little money, Maggie also has to contend with a father (Frank Finlay) suffering from incipient Alzheimer's.

So, is Life Begins merely Cold Feet with 40-something rather than 30-something characters, and an added fear of mortality?

Bullen is eager to avoid invidious comparisons. He does not view this as some sort of televisual beauty contest.

"As far as Cold Feet is concerned, I've done that, got the T-shirt," he asserts, in a tone that brooks no contradiction. "Although Life Begins is in similar territory, I don't feel there is any ghost hanging over the project.

"This is a completely different set of characters and stories. Every episode of Cold Feet ate up large chunks of plot. Here, we really spend time with the two main characters — it's like eavesdropping on their lives. This is not Cold Feet by another name."

But, Bullen is bracing himself for flak. "Journalists will no doubt say, 'It's not as good as Cold Feet'. I expect sarcastic critics to be sarcastic, because that's what sarcastic critics do," he says, sarcastically.

"But it's the audience that matters, and they won't make that comparison. My name probably doesn't even register with them. People should just view it on its own terms. People who have already seen the first episode have said to me, 'It's not Cold Feet, is it?', which I see as a good thing."

Life Begins certainly has a darker tone than its bright and breezy forerunner: "Cold Feet got darker as it went along" — as the death of Rachel (Helen Baxendale) underlined — "but this is dark from the start. Phil walks out before the first ad break."

This subtle intermingling of tone was one of the strengths of Cold Feet.

"Comedy-dramas are difficult to pull off because, to succeed, they have to work on two levels, to be funny and dramatic," Bullen says. "The key is emotional truth. You can milk a situation for all its comedic potential as long as you remain within the bounds of credibility. Do that, and you can switch between genres at will, which allows for a much greater emotional impact.

"So, for example, in Cold Feet we could play the dysfunctional relationship between Pete [John Thomson] and his father for laughs, then gobsmack the audience by killing Dad off on his way to his grandson's christening."

The writer pulls off the same trick in Life Begins. He injects humour into the most seemingly depressing scene. When Maggie informs her disapproving mother that Phil has abandoned her, the mother sniffs, "You know, you're the first person in my family to have a failed marriage."

"Well," Maggie retorts, "at last I've done something to make you proud."

Bullen explains he is a glass-half-empty person. "That's important for my style. I'm always looking to undercut the happiness of any situation." But that cuts the other way, too. "This won't be Bleak Feet," he confirms. "I've never felt that drama should be unremittingly bleak.

"That's my main complaint about soaps such as EastEnders. Life's not like that. Even at times of greatest distress, there are moments of humour."

Bullen, who is married with two children, also has an ear for the way that much goes unsaid in relationships. Quentin reckons his scripts "read like a dream, but when you come to play them you see they're terribly complex. At dinner, a woman will say to her husband, 'Do you remember when ... ?', and you realise there's a huge amount of subtext there."

Bullen doesn't like American "huggy-huggy, I-love-you moments. I prefer someone saying, 'Are we going to eat now?' — which is our way of saying, 'I love you'. That's much more effective. It's part of our national character to talk in code."

Bullen has moved with his family to Australia, but he was brought up in the less exotic environment of Solihull in the West Midlands. After Cambridge, he worked in advertising and at the BBC World Service.

He broke through as a writer when he poured himself on to the screen as Adam, the lovable singleton played by James Nesbitt, in the pilot of Cold Feet.

As the series progressed, Bullen exhausted all the dramatic events that had happened to him, and had to draw instead on his pals' experiences.

"It interests me how writers cannibalise their own experiences and those of those around them. Maybe we're trying to make sense of our confusions."

- INDEPENDENT