UFO Info Week-End

It will be fascinating to see whether this applies to his other paintings

It will be fascinating to see whether this applies to his other paintings.”If all goes to plan, the results will be revealed in 2006. Rather than staging a series of “blockbuster” exhibitions, which would be prohibitively expensive, the conclusions will be shown alongside each painting in galleries from Munich to Paris to Washington.For a man who believed in the merits of closely observing a scientific subject and then publishing the results, this is a concept of which Leonardo would surely have approved. Mike Bullen, the creator of Cold Feet, Britain’s popular home-grown thirtysomething drama, is adamant that this coming series, the fifth, will be the last. He largely accepts criticisms that the fourth series, which ended with Adam and Rachel as parents, Karen and David on the point of divorce, and Pete marrying his second wife, Jo, in Australia, was not up to par. Indeed, he had argued a couple of times beforehand that the show had run its course but was persuaded otherwise. Better to get out, he thinks, before a tried-and-tested formula goes completely stale.Yet, tried-and-tested though it seems now, Cold Feet was striking when it was piloted, five years ago, particularly for ITV.

Bullen says it felt different because it was a clear homage to American television “Hill Street Blues, when it was first on, blew me away. It treated the audience as intelligent, and the [production] values were much closer to cinema. I wanted to get those values in Cold Feet,” he says.As for the story line, it was originally based on Bullen, who grew up in middle-class Solihull, the son of a chemical engineer, and his own friends – all of whom will be seen in the flesh in a special ITV documentary next month. “I was Adam at the time, casting around from one hopeless relationship to another looking for Rachel. In the course of the programme, I have married, became a father two times around and those experiences are all in there.”He began writing because he was exasperated at finding nothing he wanted to watch on television. He was working for the BBC World Service at the time, having already abandoned his post-Cambridge career of advertising in an early midlife crisis.”I took up writing at the age of 34, because I was watching crap on television and thinking, ‘I could write crap on television.’” His first effort was, indeed, woeful, so he went on a writing course; he produced a script about the FA Cup final, and Granada Television snapped it up Then it asked what other ideas he had.

“I want to do a relationship drama where you look at it from both points of view,” he told it. That was Cold Feet, a drama he describes as “unashamedly middle class”.”When I started writing, drama was either costume drama about the upper classes or grim kitchen-sink drama. But I’m middle class, and there’s nothing I could do about it. I’ve never understood why you should have to apologise for something most of us are.”Perhaps it was its middle-classness that made the series seem so BBC. Bullen always thought the BBC was its natural home, and ITV took a lot of convincing to play it. “The pilot was 18 months before the series, and we only got the series commissioned because we won the Golden Rose of Montreux [the festival's top prize].”It was David Liddiment, then ITV’s new director of programmes, who gave the go-ahead.