Peter Souter

That's Mine, This Is Yours (Radio 4, Wednesday) was a wryly romantic comedy by Peter Souter whose success on radio (Goldfish Girl, for one) sent him rocketing off to ITV where writers with a gift for the wistful are not cherished as much as those whose scripts come dripping in murder. Here, with brilliant Tamsin Greig and Alex Jennings as the divorced couple meeting to divide up the leftovers of their marriage and clever Gordon House as director, he shone again.

Peter Souter's play is a romantic comedy. Alex Jennings and Tamsin Greig play a couple who are splitting up. They meet in their old, cold house to divide up their joint possessions. There's a locked sea chest, an old tandem, a little tin chicken that lays tin eggs, that sort of stuff. As they go through it all they're bound to think of how they got them (just like in that great song, Thanks For the Memory) and the icy atmosphere warms up. They know each other well. And this writer (remember his Goldfish Girl?) knows how funny that can be.

'Married Single Other' for second series?

Married Single Other writer Peter Souter has revealed that a decision on a possible second series is imminent.

Romantic comedy drama has always been a precarious juggling trick to pull off, especially in the shadow of the Cold Feet's unassailable reputation. So all credit to writer Peter Souter for even attempting the feat with Married, Single, Other.

An ensemble piece, the show uses three contrasting pairs to explore various aspects of heterosexual, thirty-something, white, Anglo-Saxon coupledom. There is one black character, but so far she has had to conduct her relationship off-camera.

First up are Lillie (Lucy Davis) and Eddie (Shaun Dooley), partners and parents for 16 years, but yet to commit to marriage. Then we meet Babs (Amanda Abbington) and Dickie (Dean Lennox Kelly), practitioners of wildly satisfying sex, but emotionally incompatible and financially insoluble. Finally there's bed-hopping playboy Clint (Ralph Little) cherishing an uncharacteristic devotion to Abbey (Miranda Raison), a beautiful model who is tired of the attentions of shallow men.

So far, so formulaic, but Married, Single, Other really does strain to impress with dialogue that is clever to the point of infuriating. All of the characters, including the teenage cast members, effortlessly exchange the kind of badinage that looks great on paper, but tests an actor's abilities, and patience, to the limit. Davis and Dooley just about pull it off, everybody else struggles to convince.

Little has the hardest time. His casting as a smooth-talking, worldly-wise ad man/lothario is irretrievably undermined by the first shot he features in, with bare chested Clint seen sitting in his bed beneath a giant soft-porn nude photo that would offend the sexual sophistication of a 12-year-old boy. Quite how everybody involved failed to realise that this visual shorthand screamed 'I am emotionally and sexually retarded' is beyond me.

Clint, the show labours to assure us, is flawed, but likeable and this is largely how I feel about Married, Single, Other. There's not enough comedy and too much schmaltz, but episode one did contain several surprises and one genuine shock, with the characters sufficiently engaging to merit sticking with a little longer. Which isn't the advice I'd give to Abbey regarding Clint.

Married, Single, Other is more obsessed with matrimony than even Iain Duncan Smith. ITV's new six-part comedy drama asks us to consider which is the most natural state for a grown-up - marriage, being single or living together. It is already hurtling towards the conclusion "none of the above". We refer first to Lillie and Eddie, not only because the actors Lucy Davis and Shaun Dooley make them the far most compelling characters, but because they appear to be content, and have been, so we are told several times, for 16 happily unmarried years.

The only tension in the relationship is Eddie's determination to marry Lillie, a desire that manifests itself in ludicrous romantic gestures on her birthdays, on one of which we join them. "May I refer you to the window?" asks Eddie, opening the curtain on a collage of post-it notes that spell "Will You Marry Me?" Eddie, a blameless paramedic and all round good sort, is a sentimentalist, so soppy you hardly realise that towards the end of the episode he has entered the euthanasia debate on the side of do-not-revive.

He is further goaded toward the altar by the neuroses of his 11-year-old son, who in an embellishment the writer Peter Souter should have thought better of, is a child prodigy and speaks in sitcom clever-clever. Joe (Jack Scanlon) is so anxious that his parents do the proper thing he scripts his father's proposal speeches in a scrapbook. Lillie is having none of it, not merely because she is happily in love as she is (which would have done for me) but because she works at a refuge for battered wives. By the end of last night's opener, rather than book Joe into therapy with her mate Babs, she has relented, however. In the Richard Curtis moment we all feared, she proposes to Eddie at her birthday party.

Among the guests are, of course, Babs who is married to a loser called Dickie, although you might want to abbreviate the name. Dickie, an all-night online gambler, get-rich-quick fantasist and biker, is so broadly written that Dean Lennox Kelly does well to make any sense of him at all in his performance. If only Amanda Abbington could have made us see what he sees in the dreary child shrink she plays. Meanwhile, the inveterate Lothario Clint, played by Ralf Little, has fallen for a blonde model called Abbey, played by Miranda Raison who, natch, is not a bimbo after all but well on to him. Clint: "You have only just met me" Abbey: "I have met you a thousand times before."

Where Souter and his executive producer Andy Harries are going dramatically rather than thematically with all this, I am not sure, and maybe that is a good thing. Souter has mentioned Richard Curtis's name and Andy Harries made Cold Feet, still the gold standard for this kind of post-watershed soap. The programme's titles carry the words "married", "single", "other" with boxes next to them and there is more than an element of box ticking in both the piece's premise and execution. The dialogue needs to unclench and the story needs to be given time to grow organically as the characters, one prays, deepen.

Married Single Other is what you might call a box-ticker. Feisty women - check. Feckless blokes - check. Clever kid who outsmarts parents - check. The trouble is, there wasn't a single character I could relate to - and when it comes to bonding with a drama, that's a pretty important box to miss.

That's not to say Peter Souter's romantic comedy drama, a stub-toed version of the over-rated Cold Feet, is not without its diverting moments. Souter used to work in advertising and that shines through in the script. Foxy and intelligent model Abbey tells mildly sleazy Clint: 'I'll be running a credit check - to see if anyone gives you any,' when she agrees to give him the benefit of the doubt and meet his female mates. A smart line for sure but about as believable as Abbey giving Clint the time of day. She wasn't just out of his league, they weren't even playing the same game.

So in Married Single Other we're in a strange kind of down-at-heel fantasy land, where all the women are sorted and strong and all the men are suffering varying degrees of arrested development. They're either doormats or dopes or an irksome combination of the two. Pick your male role model from bed-hopping ad lad Clint, randy dotcom dreamer Dickie and sweet-but-needs-to-grow-abackbone paramedic Eddie. Not exactly spoilt for choice there.

Which left no other option but to cheer for Lillie (a suitably spiky Lucy Davis), Eddie's long-term partner, mother of two kids and a strong character firmly opposed to the notion of marriage. Then she went and spoilt it all by caving in to the pressure to get hitched, but not because of partner Eddie, who'd been proposing every year on her birthday for 15 years. No, it was a proposal speech written by her young son which melted her mean, stony heart and saw her chuck her principles out of the window. It had the strong whiff of male wish-fulfilment about it, a box that gets ticked far too much on TV as it is.

The fey music and cutesy title sequence are irresistible reminders of Cold Feet, the fondly remembered and influential series centred on the turbulent lives of a group of 30-something friends. Married Single Other is similar, but with softer edges that belie its gritty, northern housing estate setting. So it's a lightish drama with dark corners; the friends are fast-talking and there are shafts of humour; the designated funny guy is Ralf Little as Clint, a boozing, birding lad-about-town who falls for a comely, leather-clad motorbike-demo model (Spooks's Miranda Raison). Just when you think Married Single Other is a bit of froth, it goes all serious when Lillie (Lucy Davis) gets on the wrong side of an angry husband at the women's refuge where she works. And just to wrong-foot you once more, it then reveals a sentimental streak about 15 miles wide. So it's an odd mix, but likeable, even though Peter Souter's script doesn't offer many surprises and you may think you've seen it all before.

Married, Single, Other certainly has the potential to stand on its own two, er, feet. Penned by debutant writer Peter Souter, a former ad-man, the series gives a flavour of three couples at different stages of their relationships.

So, the new Cold Feet? Maybe. "Of course, you never know what people will like," 30-year-old Raison cautions. "It could be that everyone will tune into some celebrity show instead."

The BBC has its own credit crunch so repeats are piling up (five, not counting regulars, on Radio 4 alone today). But, as someone once said, it's not a repeat if you missed it first time. So, if this first radio play by Peter Souter escaped you originally, don't let it pass unnoticed now. It's funny, romantic, recognisable. Also beautifully acted (Tamsin Greig, Rory Kinnear, Nicky Henson, Kerry Shale) and directed (by Gordon House). And it heralded the start of Souter's truly promising career. If BBC radio drama funds permit, of course.

Sam (Rory Kinnear) is a director of an advertising agency. His actress girlfriend Gemma (Tamsin Greig) has gone off to film a soap opera in New York. He sets off, of course, to film his next commercial there too, finds he has a possible rival (Kerry Shale) and ends up in jail, pouring out his troubles to his distinctly under-impressed cell mate. Can we be sure of a happy ending? Well, it is Christmas. This is the first radio play by Peter Souter, creative director of a real-life major ad agency, directed by comedy whizz Gordon House.