Big Bad World

Sophisticated, clever and funny drama with lots of witty lines and situations is good, grown-up entertainment which doesn't insult the intelligence of its audience.

Unless, that is, you've seen `Cold Feet' in which case `Big Bad World' is totally derivative with characters and plot-lines drawn directly from the earlier program. In short a blatant rip-off.

As I remember, the first series of this was well-cast and good humoured, more immediate than 'Cold Feet', and with less soap-opera situations. Emma Fielding and Steve Nicolson were particularly good, and even Ardal O'Hanlan showed a bit of range.

The second series was horribly sentimental. Most of the cast were replaced by worse-looking, worse actors. All responsible should never work in television ever again. But they probably don't, because it's a fickle industry.

The funniest episode had a German getting high on the herb and vapourising cows with a shotgun. I remember it well.

I started watching this series from the beginning. For the first season it was on the surface another Cold Feet clone. However the series soon proved to me that it had something else to offer viewers. Cold Feet, for all its strengths, took the route of being rather angst ridden shortly into its run. Big Bad World on the other hand focused a lot more of the comedy at the time providing one relationship that was completely stable (unlike the rocky relationship it was based upon in Cold Feet) and another that was entirely routed in the televisual tradition of the will they/wont they relationship.

Then the first season ended and the series was unheard of for a few years. When next it showed it's head the show was dramatically altered, episode length was halved as was the cast with absolutely no mention of the missing characters, essentially the show was rebranded from comedy-drama to a more conventional sit-com. Of course being on ITV this meant it now was rubbish and nobody watched it again.