Cold feet warm heart.

TV Cold Feet returned to television last night after over a decade off-air (this blog offered a paragraph about the now not final episode back in 2003) and somehow it's one of those examples of the revival genre which has somehow managed to recreate the show just as it was but in a later era.  Logically too, with none of the characters having stayed still, they feel older, lived in, the intervening years really showing in their faces.  How do actors manage to pick up characters after all these years and simply continue playing them in this way?

Part of the series is about filling the hole where Helena Baxendale's Rachel used to be although a fair amount of the show will be about that loss and how even after many years such things endure.  Seems wrong somehow not having her their but isn't that was death is?  Either way, I had slightly hoped that they would have made the show as though she hadn't been killed off, that she would have been just in there just to mess with viewers.  Having her long lost sister turn up wouldn't have been completely out of genre.  Or have her Friends character Emily wander through.  But no, she's not there.

Not that the creator Mike Bullen didn't try according to this Guardian set-visit:

"Following many years of being asked to bring the show back, Bullen finally agreed. The producers persuaded all of the original cast to return – with one notable exception. He did write a part for Baxendale, but she didn’t fancy playing a ghost. “She said, ‘Thanks but no thanks – it’s a crap part’,” laughs Bullen. “She definitely made the right decision. It was just me being sentimental.”"

Well ... true, plus without heading off into proper fantasy she presumably also wouldn't have had her own autonomy as a character, simply hanging around, reacting to Adam.  But the character is still there through her lack and because of that she's in nearly every scene.