Cold Feet - Background

Background

Series creator Mike Bullen's working relationship with Granada Television began in 1994 when his agent sold his first screenplay, a one-off comedy-drama called The Perfect Match, to the company's head of comedy Andy Harries. Harries had been looking for television scripts that would reflect the lives of people from his generation—people in their 30s who were under-represented on television. The Perfect Match, about a man who proposes to his girlfriend at the FA Cup Final and has to deal with constant media attention afterwards, was made and then broadcast in 1995. Harries asked Bullen to pitch more ideas for television to The Perfect Match's assistant producer Christine Langan. As a fan of American television such as Thirtysomething, Frasier and Hill Street Blues, Bullen pitched Cold Feet, a traditional "boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-wins-girl-back" story told from both sides of the relationship but using elements of fantasy and flashback to distort events to fit a character's point of view. The initial pitch centred on Adam Williams and Rachel Bradley (James Nesbitt and Helen Baxendale), which Harries believed would diminish the storytelling potential if the ITV Network Centre commissioned a full series after the pilot, so Bullen "tacked on" plots for two other couples—Adam and Rachel's respective friends Pete and Jenny Gifford (John Thomson and Fay Ripley) and David and Karen Marsden (Robert Bathurst and Hermione Norris).

The pilot was directed by Father Ted's Declan Lowney over 12 days in 1996 on location around Greater Manchester. The programme was one of four one-off Comedy Premieres made by Granada for ITV. Cold Feet was eventually broadcast on 30 March 1997. It received only 3.5 million viewers and little critical attention. As ITV's comedy portfolio was so thin, Cold Feet was submitted as the network's comedy entry at the Montreux Television Festival in May 1997. There it won the Silver Rose for Humour and the Rose d'Or, the highest accolade of the festival. ITV scheduled a repeat broadcast a few days afterwards but did not commission a series. Not until David Liddiment's appointment as director of programming at ITV in August 1997 was a six episode series ordered.