Review of Cold Feet: The Complete Fifth Series

Introduction

The fifth and final series of the popular drama/comedy about three couples and their inter-mingling relationships. At the start of this season, Adam (James Nesbitt) and Rachel (Helen Baxendale) negotiate the life of their newborn son around difficulties with money, tenancy and unemployment; Pete (John Thompson) and new Australian bride Jo (Kimberly Joseph) discover that the Manchester suburbs are not necessarily the best place to perpetuate a fleeting, sun-soaked liaison. And finally David (Robert Bathurst) and Karen (Hermione Norris) finalize their divorce in less than amicable terms. It all sounds innocuous enough, but the show’s writers aren’t beyond pulling every possible heart-string by throwing in a surprise character kill-off that only briefly interrupts all the bickering, worrying, joking and pop psychology.

Video

Disappointing. Although it’s in anamorphic widescreen, the seem rather too harsh and the image doesn’t have the crispness that we’d expect from such a recent broadcast.

Audio

Bearable stereo, although the Top 40 soundtrack is not.

Features

No justifiably deleted scenes? No ‘hilarious’ outtakes? No pointless featurette? No back-slapping commentary track?... No.

Conclusion

The general consensus is that ‘Cold Feet’ should have halted its run a couple of series ago, and watching this final series as a newcomer to this franchise it`s not difficult to see why. Although the producers have curtailed the eight episodes in the fourth series to a more slender six, there’s still a feeling of flabbiness here, and there’s only so many potential romantic entanglements and father/son reunions we can endure before noticing that the writers are resting on their laurels indulging in repetitive dramatic devices.

If the ensemble are engaging enough (although Nesbitt and Granger rely a bit too much on annoying schtick and histrionic ticks to carry their characters) the situations regurgitated here are pure cliché: Pete’s insecurity (because he’s fat, of course) over his meal-ticket fitness-instructor wife; Adam’s feelings of being displaced in Rachel’s affections with the arrival of his attention-seeking infant son growing into full-blown emasculation when he loses his job; Bumbling half-wit David (with a mystifying high-power job), and his bed-spring busting dalliance with his predatorial divorce lawyer (Lucy Robinson). There’s only so much that the occasionally charming actors (most notably Thomson, Joseph and Robinson) can do to intermittently enliven such staid plots, whilst playing their ‘real’ (analogue for dull) characters.

Whereas it was once clearly marking its territory as a light-weight revival of ‘Friends’ for the slightly more cynical, class-conscious British audience, ‘Cold Feet’ by now almost abandons such frothy things in favor of leaden melodrama, smuggled in straight from soap opera (alcoholism, infidelity, etc.) So much so that the show has to stage a funeral in order to feel free to crack some gags, and as a result the contrivance of the gesture is more noticeable than any resulting humor. This new found drama-bias makes the already jarring introduction of a spluttering Spanish house-keeper (Jacey Salles, acting as if she is on the Ricki Lake show) look even more like a tonal oversight. And, in both a final leap into serious drama and a transparent attempt to nail ‘thirtysomething’ pathos for the final curtain, episode five features the shock death of a major character (for the sake of those who care and/or don’t know, I won’t reveal the unfortunate victim.) An event which is greeted with either a curious numbed serenity or clipped bouts of heart-wrenched emoting by all concerned.

By the time we reach ‘Requiem for Coldplay’ on that iconic British locale of inner resuscitation (um, the seaside) for the friends-reunited bonding session over dumping ashes, every middle-class relationship cliché has been plundered for all its worth whilst still managing to say very little about anything (other than perhaps the unfeasible material demands of the middle-classes) and entertain only sporadically. This may prove a fitting farewell for fans, but as an alien to such things, this staid, meandering stuff didn’t make a convert out of me.