Keeley Hawes

Mutual Friends, may not be a ratings hit but I'm enjoying the talents of the two stars - the brilliant Marc Warren and the scene-stealing Alexander Armstrong. It manages to be hilariously funny and quite deep and serious in places.

Before its first screening, critics were comparing it to ITV1's Cold Feet, but Mutual Friends does have its own engrossing style and the story is very different. Warren and Armstrong bounce off each other brilliantly while there's good support from an ensemble cast including Emily Joyce as Martin's boss and Sarah Alexander.

Being very easy to watch and surprisingly very funny, it's the kind of drama only us Brits could achieve with a good mix of proper drama and human, normal characters. The only possible flaw is that I've yet to warm to Keeley Hawes's character.

This curious drama with occasional laughs is still struggling to find its feet and its identity, something that isn't helped by its underwritten, shallow and irritating female characters. This isn't really their fault, because they have almost nothing to do except whine, cling or just generally be pointless and annoying.

Poor Sarah Alexander in particular is saddled with a deadly role as Liz, ex-girlfriend of tedious lothario Patrick (Alexander Armstrong). One minute she's quite sane and sensible, the next she's behaving like a halfwit. Things are still being kept together by Marc Warren as Martin, the hopeless cuckold whose desperate attempts to win back the affections of wife Jen (Keeley Hawes) keep hitting the rocks.

A shudderingly badly written new TV drama that wouldn't last beyond the first week in a theatre. On TV it'll carry on for six godforsaken episodes. It is one of those vaguely unpleasant pieces that thinks it's a black comedy but has neither the charm nor the cruelty to pull it off.

People shitting in other people's shoes? Hilarious, I'm sure. The soundtrack - a knowing, jaunty tango - amplifies every failing.

The estimable cast - Marc Warren, Alexander Armstrong - have a vaguely betrayed air, as if they know the script can barely cover their naked shame. Only Keeley Hawes has thrown her heart into it, seeming to relish her shallow, unappealing character. I used to really like her as an actress. One line for me sums up the poverty of this script. A poor child actor had to deliver a bombshell about his parents' infidelity. He was only a kid but he still seemed to cringe as he said the words: Is Uncle Carl in heaven? Good. Now he won't be able to shag mummy any more. Can you think of a smarmier, more contrived line of dialogue? A more obvious plot-hinge, a cheaper, nastier, less plausible sentence for a child to deliver?

Mutual Friends started with a suicide but ended with a fire engine. Carl's suicide was the writers' device with which to bring together his surviving friends, Martin, played by Marc Warren, and Patrick (Alexander Armstrong). Martin was the worrying type and he had loads to worry about: not only was he about to lose his job as a solicitor but his wife, Jen (Keeley Hawes), announced that she had slept with Carl and that their marriage was in trouble (all Martin's fault).

Patrick also had his problems: a personal financial crisis had got his E-Type Jag repossessed and one of his business partners was edging him out of his own Boden-style catalogue company while edging himself into his former girlfriend's knickers. The worrying thing about Patrick, buoyed along by ego and testosterone, was his inability to worry. Yet this follicly challenged Lothario was not, it transpired, irredeemably self-centred. It was he, after all, who was responsible for the fire engine's comical appearance - called not to hose a conflagration but to fulfil Martin's disgruntled young son's ambition to ride on one.

Warren, Armstrong and Hawes are watchable actors but you couldn't help but wish their parts had been occupied by Jimmy Nesbitt, Robert Bathurst and Helen Baxendale and that, as in Cold Feet, there had been room for a genuinely funny subplot (as regularly supplied by the actors Fay Ripley and John Thomson). Nor could you fail to spot how inspiration was running out even as early as episode one. Martin, for instance, kept being overheard saying things that he shouldn't by the people he was badmouthing. Only once could you accuse the programme of inventiveness and that was in the character of Carl's widow Leigh, played with cheerful understatement by Claire Rushbrook, who had clearly lost her how-to-grieve manual and went round saying how 'cross' she was with him.

My hunch is that Mutual Friends will keep its audience, not least because it is unusual in putting at its centre male rather than female friendships. But how, even as I watched its titles (as ripped off from Mad Men), I wished for more subtlety, more black humour, more depth of emotion!

The Beeb has managed to hash out a few frothy, camp, enjoyable dramas over the years with the likes of Cutting It and Playing The Field. Now, it's got a new one to add to the ranks, with the debut of Mutual Friends.

Making a decent drama is hardly rocket science: keep it simple, write about what you know and hope the viewers can empathise. In this case, it was a group of dysfunctional friends in their thirties and forties, juggling love, life and infidelities with a healthy blend of irreverence and drama.

It's a straightforward format, which is probably why BBC's last high-profile drama, Bonekickers, failed so miserably. That had a similar conceit: a group of dysfunctional archaeologists juggling love, life and ancient mystic artefacts. Yep, that's where they lost us. Poor old Adrian Lester, who starred in Bonekickers, must have been slightly envious to see his former Hustle co-star, Marc Warren, getting some meaty lines and heartfelt drama here. Elsewhere, the rest of the cast was flawless: Keeley Hawes as Warren's self-righteous and estranged wife, Alexander Armstrong using a dash of his sometime persona as the Pimm's man to play a surprisingly convincing ladykiller (seriously, the man oozed charm) with Sarah Alexander as his ex-fiancée. Hopefully, the sardonic humour will continue as the series progresses.

Mutual Friends at first feels like a hybrid of just about every TV series and film about angst-ridden friends approaching midlife crises, from The Big Chill through Thirtysomething and on to Cold Feet. But, for all its familiarity, it could be a grower, thanks to Marc Warren and Alexander Armstrong as friends pitched into emotional turmoil after the suicide of their best pal.

Warren, who's best known for playing wide boys and sleazebags, shows a real gift for comedy (Mutual Friends is described as, oh dear, a 'comedy drama', which as we all know means it's not much of either). He does a morning-after-a-drunken-night-before scene that's so achingly realistic, complete with a drool-covered sofa, it's hard not to feel dry-mouthed and wretched in sympathy. Mutual Friends is an ensemble piece, also starring Keeley Hawes as Warren's unhappy wife and Sarah Alexander as Armstrong's ex-partner, but it's the comic chemistry between Warren and Armstrong (playing an ageing lothario) that could just turn out to be the best reason for watching.

Starring many familiar faces, Keeley Hawes from Ashes To Ashes, Marc Warren from Hustle and Alexander Armstrong from comedies, this is a mixed bag.

Any show that starts with a reunion of old friends at a funeral is going to end up being compared to 80s film The Big Chill.

This new six-parter starring Marc Warren and Alexander Armstrong as chalk-and-cheese mates will also hook the Cold Feet crowd - with a nod to Desperate Housewives provided by the mystery of why their old pal Carl threw himself under a train.

I'm guessing it's because his wife Leigh (Claire Rushbrook) was secretly guzzling all his anti-depressants. The supposedly grieving widow is in such high spirits during this first hour, you wouldn't be surprised to see her suggest a game of naked Twister at his funeral.

Martin, a grumpy lawyer played by Warren, is harder hit by his friend's death, especially after his wife Jen (Keeley Hawes) blurts out (for no good reason) that she slept with Carl, sending their already dodgy marriage into a nosedive.

Warren wasn't the first choice for this part, which was originally earmarked for Armstrong's comedy partner Ben Miller. But he's as magnetically watchable here as usual, especially when tormented by visions of Jen and Carl together. Armstrong's character Patrick is a blabbermouthed perpetual teenager with a mail-order clothing business and a silver E-type Jag - cunningly shot here to look longer than the QE2. Only his ex-fiancee Liz (Sarah Alexander) is unimpressed.

Though billed as a comedy drama, there's more drama than comedy - but plenty to enjoy in this first, pacy instalment.