That was life

Ten years ago, This Life blistered onto the screens full of swearing, drug-taking and nudity. And unsurprisingly it received plenty of attention. And it did genuinely seem to be ground-breaking TV, the first programme to bring adulthood to life so vividly.

But as the recent repeats on BBC2 demonstrated, behind all the adult content there was very little left. Now that swearing and nudity are less shocking (and done much better by HBO programmes), This Life seems far less revolutionary. In fact, the first season was just plain bad, with awkward dialogue, pointless nauseating camerawork and non-existent storylines. The second series is where the show hit gold, taking in more characters, coherent plots and developing the cast into almost likable beings.

This Life + 10 should have been a brilliant guide to what happened to those self-indulgent characters. Instead it just decided to play like an episode tagged on to the last series. Very little of what became of the young lawyers was really revealed - we just had to accept they were where they were and run with it. Where was Miles' first wife? Why was Warren mourning Ferdy when it was implied the dead courier had gone back to his wife? What killed Ferdy?

As it was written by Amy Jenkins, who wrote the not-as-good-as-the-second first series, we only got something akin to patchy opening season. The far more interesting auxiliary cast such as Kira, Jo, Nicki and Rachel were not even referenced, and the original five characters were not so much characters as blindly drawn caricatures. Milly appeared to be some sort of earth mother one minute, control freak the next. Egg was the great writer to begin with, before deciding he hates writing. Miles was just a cock and the awful stereotype of a career woman craving a child that had become was just offensive to the memory.

Perhaps there would have been no pleasing This Life fans, but this one-off did nothing to add to the series and only made the infuriatingly ambiguous character more infuriating ambiguous. But, maybe that was the whole idea?