James Nesbitt

Cold Feet, series 7, ITV review: more comedy than drama

After last year's comeback, it's a fresh start for Mike Bullen's friends.

Cold Feet cast talk about Manchester bombing

The Cold Feet cast reveal Manchester bombing led to sombre return to filming.

Cold Feet, series 2 episode 1, review

It's always incredibly risky to revive a much-loved show. Few manage to recreate the magic, let alone match the success. Porridge, Red Dwarf and Still Open All Hours have all been dusted off and brought back to our screens, and are still chugging away, but with a fraction of the viewers and former acclaim. Cold Feet (ITV) is the exception.

Why did you come back, Cold Feet?

Returning for a seventh series, the show has sacrificed nuance and realism in favour of caricature and soap-opera silliness.

What's going to happen in the next series of Cold Feet?

Adam, Pete, Jenny, David and Karen are back on screens this autumn.

The host welcomes stars of the revived comedy-drama Cold Feet. Robert Bathurst and Hermione Norris are perhaps perceived as too posh for chatshows, so here we get James Nesbitt, Fay Ripley and John Thomson - the latter returning from the wilderness with some great performances. The avowedly un-laddish but also strangely unchallenging comedian Joe Lycett is also a guest, with Phil Collins providing music.

Cold Feet episode 7 recap

Pete embraces mindfulness, David anticipates a jail term but it's mainly all about Adam and Tina.

Cold Feet just made another blunder involving airport

Cold Feet fans were left wondering if they needed an eye test after Monday night's episode when they noticed a pretty major production blunder.

Old wives' tales have had a bad press down the years. If you drop a fork it means a man is coming to visit. A loaf, once cut, cannot be turned upside down. Brexit means an end to straight bananas (or, indeed, Brexit means Brexit). But just occasionally, the biddies get it right: Cold Feet, warm heart.

It washed back all over our screens, marred only by the kind of breathless media hype that might have embarrassed Adolf at Nuremberg, and reminded us of some oddly hopeful days back in '97, when Mr Blair had yet to settle on his cabinet and his chosen faces for sad and happy, let alone on his fascinating career path of millionaire war criminal. The theme tune had changed, sadly (few songs speak to our fin de siecle with the redolence of Space's Female of the Species), but the title typeface was still there in all its spiky, pulsing horror. It was as close as the British got to Friends, with gratifyingly less glucose: Manhattan would never have dared to kill off its Rachel.

And it was by far the finest reheating of leftovers in this season of retro-love. Always well written, treading that tightrope between emotion and sentimentality that Manchester somehow seems always to get right, unlike some of its more shouty neighbours, this return also simply reminded us of the quality of the original cast. Witness how many have since carved out singular successes, or in James Nesbitt's case, multiple, having proved himself one of the few actors - Olivia Colman's another, and recently, Tom Hollander - equally adept at smart comedy and at drama that truly punches the kidneys.

The action has obviously moved on to midlife crises, and we can expect much filthy angsting over John Thomson's all-too-believable depression and Robert Bathurst's equally credible lack of capacity for self-examination. There's been a snaring in Singapore by Adam (Nesbitt) of a new wife, who has nothing at all going for her except youth, beauty, wit, money, wisdom, empathy and humour, and who is obviously wrong for him. All Manc life is here, which is to say all life is here, and I am hooked, line and sinker, all over again.

They've apparently moved on in Cornwall too, from tin to copper. Damn your eyes, progress!