Cold Feet revival to premiere on Acorn TV

A must-watch TV show in the late 90s and early noughties, it had one of the most devastating series finales. Now a new season is back this month.

Back when it wasn’t grossly uncool to express any kind of appreciation for Coldplay, the English band had quite a few years.

Among its most famed songs at the time was “The Scientist”, a devastating ballad with a catchy chord. The song was just as known for its video clip, in which Chris Martin plays a man walking backwards through a city until it reveals the scene of a car accident in which his female companion is killed.

The first time you see it, it’s a gut-punch.

That song was released in November 2002. Four months later, “The Scientist” would be used as the track over an emotionally wrenching scene in the series finale of Cold Feet as the five remaining core characters of the British dramedy scattered the ashes of Rachel, killed in a car accident.

It was a perfect song choice for such a sorrowful sequence.

A real tear-jerker of a scene

Adam and Rachel were couple goals in the 1990s

It may have been 15 years since that moment but it remains potent in the memories of Cold Feet fans. The show was something of a cultural phenomenon in late 90s and early noughties, a series about six thirty-somethings facing the challenges of life, love and work — everyday stuff.

It ran for five years and made international stars of its cast James Nesbitt, John Thomson, Fay Ripley, Hermione Norris, Robert Bathurst and Helen Baxendale. By the time Blaxendale would go on to play poor Emily on Friends a year after Cold Feet’s debut, she was already known thanks to Cold Feet.

When Cold Feet ended in 2003 with Rachel’s death, her funeral episode drew a series high in audiences in the UK. This is a show that pretty much went out on its own terms.

Which, of course, made it ripe for a revival.

A sixth season, with Nesbitt, Ripley, Thomson, Bathurst and Norris returning, premiered in 2016, followed by a seventh.

Those two series played on Channel 7 and 7Two, but, given that it’s 2019, the eighth series will debut on a streaming service, Acorn TV, on October 14. Cold Feet season eight will be the first Australian premiere to be hosted on Acorn TV, which is focused on British TV and also includes shows such as Victoria, Broadchurch and Midsomer Murders.

The other seven seasons of Cold Feet are also on Acorn TV to stream. For fans who missed the revival episodes when it was on free-to-air TV, they can now binge their return to the lives of Adam, Pete, Jenny, Karen and David.

Adam is older but now with more hair

Such is the power of those Cold Feet memories that the revival episodes may surface some dormant emotions fans didn’t realise they still had.

“There’s a scene (in the first episode of the revival) in where Adam takes his teenage son (with Rachel) to the house in which the boy was born, and when I wrote that into the script, I didn’t realise just impactful the scene was going to be,” Cold Feet creator Mike Bullen told news.com.au.

“Then when we saw it for the first time in the editing suite, everybody was tearing up. It is the weight that history has for all of us. It was an amazingly emotional scene. That was when we realised that this is a show that can reach out and touch people because we all go through life carrying with us the legacies of the lives we’ve lived up to that stage.

“Whereas most dramas just refer to that — ‘Do you remember 20 years ago when X happened?’ — we’ve actually shown that in the past in the show. Any fans who saw that in the original series have got that in their own memory banks.”

In between the original run’s end in 2003 and the revival in 2016, Bullen had been approached many times to bring it back.

But, Bullen said, he and his wife had been too busy raising their own kids, and since he has always drawn from his own life experiences, he thought the mundanity of child rearing wasn’t interesting enough to write about.

Thirteen years later, as the Cold Feet characters would be moving into their 50s, and their kids are sufficiently grown, it became a different story.

Cold Feet season eight will premiere on Acorn TV

“We’re now joining the characters when they’re looking beyond child raising and having to reflect on what their lives are all about. So I felt I had new things to say about these characters and the stage they’re at.

“To me, the most fascinating thing about people moving into their 50s is that I think it’s a difficult period for human beings because for so long, if you have children, you can define your own purpose through your kids. Your purpose is to be a parent.

“When your children no longer need you, you have to look again at who you are and you have to start living life again.

“When you’re young, you have energy and ambition and when you become older, those faculties start to disappear and you no longer think you can play rugby for Australia or become PM. You know it’s not going to happen anymore and that can be a bit terrifying.

“You’ve just got to find other dreams, other reasons for getting up every morning.”

The self-described introspective Bullen based the premise of the show on himself and his friends and he still draws from his own experiences, and those in his circle.

“I steal from anybody and everybody. I’m still in touch with all those friends and I’ve followed their lives and they absolutely give me stuff.

“One of the reasons I wanted to do the reboot was in the intervening years I suffered from depression and I wanted to do a story about depression and how it affects the people around them. So in series six, Pete suffers depression but I wanted to explore sharing the impact of that among his wife Jenny and his kids.”

Season eight will be a big one for Jenny

Since the series return, Bullen and his team have leaned more on the dramatic side of dramedy to provoke the audience.

“The original show was a comedy drama, but I think it was only when we killed off Rachel that we really realised the power to move the audience to tears.

“Now with the new show, we are attempting to move the audience to that level of emotion much more often. I would hope that in every series there’s a moment where we are increasing the sales of tissues.

“TV, like any form of entertainment, works best when you provoke an emotion from the audience, whether it’s laughter, tears or fears.

“I think Cold Feet is an enormously satisfying journey for the audience. I would hope that at the end of an episode, they feel almost drained.”

So in season eight, expect to be moved by a storyline concerning Jenny and her health, Adam’s dating prospects and David’s dangerous new romance.

Mike Bullen based Cold Feet on himself and his friends

Bullen moved his family to Australia right after the original series wrapped and has lived here ever since, except for a brief nine-month period in 2012 in which he attempted to move everyone back to England in the hopes of resurrecting his “flatlining career”.

He was eventually overruled. “My kids rebelled,” he explained. “They were young teenagers at the time and they missed Australia. We had a family vote. I thought I had four votes but it turns out I only have one vote, so I was overruled by the rest of the family. So we moved back.”

Bullen now spends five months of the year in Manchester, where he is now filming season nine of the Cold Feet, and the rest of the time in his adopted home, Australia. He argued that his time living here has changed the flavour of the show.

“I’ve lived in Australia for the last 20 years and I think my sensibility is somewhere between British and Australia now. So I hope that’s why it does appeal to Australians because there’s a bit of the Australian attitude to life in me now.”

For fans curious about how that will be reflected in their Mancunian favourites, Cold Feet season eight will premiere on Acorn TV on October 14.

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