Cold  feet:  a  reflection   Cold Feet was something of a surprise ratings success when screened on channel seven during the latter part of last year. As the first series is being repeated (Tuesday evenings) over the holiday period, probably to prime us for a new series in 2001, some reflections came to mind as I watched the first few episodes for the second time.   The first thing I remembered watching the repeats is how much I liked Cold Feet and looked forward to keeping in touch each week with the lives of Adam and Rachel, Peter and Jenny, David and Karen. Although the very first episode drew in an audience with a naked prank involving a single red rose, Cold Feet is an eminently realistic portrayal of the lives of these three thirty-something couples that relies on the viewers sense of connectedness with them rather than the usual ratings grabbing gimmicks dished up by similar programs. The series is set in Manchester, England, though the points of contact are close enough for it to be Melbourne - which further confirmed my own pet theory that British made shows have far more in common with Australian life and culture than their American counterparts. The great strength of Cold Feet is its ability to be both interesting, witty, and realistic - everyone my age knows an Adam and we see ourselves in the relationships between all three couples to varying degrees, as those who have become parents sympathise greatly with Pete and Jenny’s struggles. Cold Feet maintains its sense of realism by refusing to glamorise or trivialise the complexity of human relationships, by resisting to succumb to political correctness and, most of all, by avoiding the paternalistic moralism common to so much of the dross that comes to our screens from the U. S of A.   There is always much poignancy and food for thought in each episode, and a great deal of substance to the issues engaged with by the writers of Cold Feet. We laugh at the absurd yet all to familiar way Pete and his dad seem incapable of expressing their love for one another until it is too late. With David and Karen we acknowledge the pressures one’s work commitments places on a marriage and in their struggles see the spectre of materialism and of our success orientated culture loom large, threatening our togetherness and families in subtle yet insidious ways. In what was certainly for me the most moving episode of the first series we watch as Adam prepares a nursery in preparation for his reunion with Rachel who, he believes, has given birth to a child during their time apart, only to find that Rachel has in fact terminated the pregnancy - as she herself puts it when the moment of truth arrives, "Adam, there is no baby." Whereas many other dramas aimed at a similar audience would have presented this as a matter-of-fact, personal right exercised, Cold Feet characteristically portrays reality rather than dogma. The image of the empty nursery powerfully communicates the sadness and the sense of loss and of what might have been, present for both members of the relationship and they stand around the empty cradle.   Unfortunately, the only character who comes across as a stereotype in the first series is Jenny’s sister - "the Christian" as Adam ungraciously calls her. This woman is presented as a Puritan killjoy stuck in the twenty-first century. On the occasion of her nephew’s baptism she reads Jesus’ (albeit hyperbolic and out of context) instruction "if your eye causes you to sin then pluck it our for it is better to pluck out your eye and enter heaven with one eye than to burn in hell with two eyes," much to the horror of priest and congregation alike. Her severe, religious extremism is overshadowed on that occasion by Adam’s completely irreligious, yet heart warmingly authentic, speech from the lectern. Once again the script writers of Cold Feet hit the mark with their audience - they know, as we in the Church must recognise, that a post-modern audience (thirty-somethings and under) will reject anything presented as rules, regulations, and codes of behavior imposed from above (even if it is good theology) but are, conversely, quite likely to warm to that which is presented as the authentic experience of another (even if it is poor theology and flawed in logic).