Married Single Other

I've been irritated and underwhelmed by new comedy drama Married Single Other, whose decent cast (including the ubiquitous Shaun Dooley) are battling against clunky exposition and a patina of arch wit that seems to make every character sound like every other character ie. arch and witty. That said, I haven't written a piece of drama that's actually been on telly since EastEnders and that's eight years ago now, so maybe I'm not in a position to nitpick.

This derivative comedy drama is buoyed up by an able enough cast and peppered with some diverting one-liners, but the constant reinforcement of gender stereotypes is wearisome.

"You're such a girl," Lillie (Lucy Davis) teased her partner Eddie last week. Unwittingly, perhaps, she gave away the secret topsy-turvy formula underpinning this series. All the men are acting like sappy romantic fools, while the women are bored witless by talk of bridal magazines and marriage.

Davis, in particular, whose character faces a tribunal tonight for thumping a violent husband (not hers), continues to turn in a very odd performance. Every line is delivered flippantly through clenched teeth, suggesting she's either had her jaws wired shut, or she's a superior being from another planet and is merely humouring these pathetic humans she's been forced to live with.

But there's one startling change this week, as Abbey's (Miranda Raison) eyes have switched from brown back to blue. Perhaps this is down to the physical effort of resisting Clint (Ralf Little). It's been a month and he's about to be put out of his misery.

This derivative comedy drama is buoyed up by an able enough cast and peppered with some diverting one-liners, but the constant reinforcement of gender stereotypes is wearisome. In tonight's episode, a boys' night out challenges Clint's (Ralf Little) self-control.

Married Single Other - ITV's huge new attempt to make "a new Cold Feet". More than six million tuned in for the first episode - proving that the simple expedient of covering every single flat surface in Britain with gigantic posters, urging people to watch the show, really has paid dividends.

The premise of the show is simple: love, huh? Men and women - coh. Life - complicated or what? With humans being what they are, if you had a drama centring on three women and three men, there's no end to the amount of platonic and romantic entanglements that could ensue.

Well obviously there is - simple mathematics tell us that it is 36. But don't let maths get in the way of meeting the characters. Here's Clint and Abbey - he's Ralf Little from Two Pints of Lager . . . , she's the model who might just inspire him to stop being a yuppie sex-pest. Here's Dickie and Babs - he's a bit Shameless, and does lots of online gambling with his shirt off, she's your classic blonde doormat all lined up to have an explosive affair by episode five. And here's Lillie and Eddie - the "beating heart" of the show. Eddie wants to marry Lillie - but Lillie works in a women's refuge, and so is inclined to say unfortunate things such as: "I don't need anyone else's fairytale! I have my own. I built my heaven right next to you, for all these years."

It's Lillie that's the problem here - played by Lucy "The Office" Davies in a series of cute faces, inverted commas, nose-wrinkling, tinkly-tonkly voices and sudden sarcasms, she makes Married Single Other play out like "Whatever Happened to Fearne Cotton?" I need not tell you what an unhappy moment for popular culture this is.

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.

If you can't face the densely plotted and complex Five Days, which starts tonight on BBC1, then you might find some light relief in Married Single Other, with its mix of sentiment and broad comedy. If only it was a bit less coarse and a little bit warmer. In the second episode, Clint (played by Ralf Little), the womaniser in the group of friends, still hasn't heard anything from Abbey, the enigmatic model with the mesmerisingly bad hair extensions. When he does, he decides to throw a dinner party at which he can impress her and, more importantly, persuade his friends to tell her flattering things about him. It all goes badly and predictably awry. His mates slowly tear one another apart as their relationships start to fracture; Babs is furious with her lazy ex-lover, Dickie; while Lillie (a winking, shrugging and twitching Lucy Davis) sounds as if she might be going off the idea of marriage to caring paramedic Eddie (Shaun Dooley).

TV Watch: Married Single Other

You know what I like about ITV1's Married Single Other? There are no tortured women imprisoned in dungeons, no one has their kidneys removed while they are still alive and no one is brutally sexually assaulted having been drugged by their gynaecologist.

Talking of cold feet, ever since Cold Feet walked off into deep storage, its sharp comedy-drama footprint has left a conspicuous hole in ITV's schedules. With its clutch of thirtysomething friends and couples, Married Single Other is an obvious attempt to step into that gap. Disappointingly, it's also obvious in less welcome ways. Clint (Ralf Little) is a bit of a womaniser and rather one dimensional in his view of the opposite sex. How do we know? Well, there were clues in the dialogue, which couldn't be accused of excessive subtlety, but the giveaway was the giant poster of a naked woman on all fours that hung over his batch-pad bed.

The poster worked as a symbol of the drama's main shortcoming, an unwillingness to let the audience do any of its own thinking. There were one or two neat exchanges - when Clint mentioned to a failed conquest that he didn't have her number, she replied: "No, but I've got yours." Mostly, though, the story lurched from one scene to the next, hurriedly trying on a weird range of ill-fitting tones, from the mawkish to the melodramatic.

Let's hope the clunking mood shifts are impatient early efforts to establish the characters. In Little, Dean Lennox Kelly and Lucy Davis, the series features actors with plenty of charm. They need to be allowed to slow down and breathe. If it wants to be the next Cold Feet, it has to cool its heels.

Every beloved and sobbed-over truism of the love and laughter genre was here, only in a crumpled and roughly conceived way. This was a grim, leaden attempt at the most demanding and tricky of genres. It turned over every tear-stained pebble following three couples, with their lovable strengths and even more lovable failings, as they struggled to be just altogether lovably flawed and inspirational while maintaining an air of winsome gaucheness. It had ticked all of [Richard] Curtis's lexicon of lumpy loveliness. There were children who spoke like wise philo­sophers; dreaming failures and cynical realists; hard men made soft; soft women who could be hard. There were inept displays of devotion and touching displays of touching; and, of course, the cringingly lovely public declaration of love. It was the whole cream tea of repressed English loveliness, and it was vomitous. I was desperate for Adams to make a guest appearance and leave a suitcase under the touchingly winsome table. What it lacked was the one element, the "I believe in fairies" thing that is the secret ingredient of romantic comedy: the writer has utterly and truly to believe every word. It must be written without winking or inverted commas. The slightest drop of irony, the merest punctuation of cynicism, and the whole thing collapses into saccharine, sentimental manipulation. I'm sure what they were looking for was another Cold Feet. What they got was Hollyoaks: The ­Thirtysomethings. Not a good look.