A long but comprehensive look back at one of British comedy's best shows, Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne's kitchen-sink comedy The Royle Family. Anchored by the scoop of bringing the two creative forces behind the show together to banter about their various real-life inspirations, it's really watchable. Even if you've seen moments like Denise and Dave's No Surprises lullaby a hundred times. Famous fans and the rest of the cast - including a touchingly reunited Ralf Little and Liz Smith - are on hand to nominate their favourite moments.

Ralf Little has revealed he was shocked when drama Married Single Other was axed - because the public had responded so positively to it. The ITV1 show was given the chop after just one series, but Ralf said: "I haven't had such a positive response since I was in The Royle Family." The actor, 30, is now writing his own comedy series, which he is trying to get commissioned.

"You're such a girl," Lillie (Lucy Davis) teased her partner Eddie last week. Unwittingly, perhaps, she gave away the secret topsy-turvy formula underpinning this series. All the men are acting like sappy romantic fools, while the women are bored witless by talk of bridal magazines and marriage.

Davis, in particular, whose character faces a tribunal tonight for thumping a violent husband (not hers), continues to turn in a very odd performance. Every line is delivered flippantly through clenched teeth, suggesting she's either had her jaws wired shut, or she's a superior being from another planet and is merely humouring these pathetic humans she's been forced to live with.

But there's one startling change this week, as Abbey's (Miranda Raison) eyes have switched from brown back to blue. Perhaps this is down to the physical effort of resisting Clint (Ralf Little). It's been a month and he's about to be put out of his misery.

This derivative comedy drama is buoyed up by an able enough cast and peppered with some diverting one-liners, but the constant reinforcement of gender stereotypes is wearisome. In tonight's episode, a boys' night out challenges Clint's (Ralf Little) self-control.

Married Single Other - ITV's huge new attempt to make "a new Cold Feet". More than six million tuned in for the first episode - proving that the simple expedient of covering every single flat surface in Britain with gigantic posters, urging people to watch the show, really has paid dividends.

The premise of the show is simple: love, huh? Men and women - coh. Life - complicated or what? With humans being what they are, if you had a drama centring on three women and three men, there's no end to the amount of platonic and romantic entanglements that could ensue.

Well obviously there is - simple mathematics tell us that it is 36. But don't let maths get in the way of meeting the characters. Here's Clint and Abbey - he's Ralf Little from Two Pints of Lager . . . , she's the model who might just inspire him to stop being a yuppie sex-pest. Here's Dickie and Babs - he's a bit Shameless, and does lots of online gambling with his shirt off, she's your classic blonde doormat all lined up to have an explosive affair by episode five. And here's Lillie and Eddie - the "beating heart" of the show. Eddie wants to marry Lillie - but Lillie works in a women's refuge, and so is inclined to say unfortunate things such as: "I don't need anyone else's fairytale! I have my own. I built my heaven right next to you, for all these years."

It's Lillie that's the problem here - played by Lucy "The Office" Davies in a series of cute faces, inverted commas, nose-wrinkling, tinkly-tonkly voices and sudden sarcasms, she makes Married Single Other play out like "Whatever Happened to Fearne Cotton?" I need not tell you what an unhappy moment for popular culture this is.

If you can't face the densely plotted and complex Five Days, which starts tonight on BBC1, then you might find some light relief in Married Single Other, with its mix of sentiment and broad comedy. If only it was a bit less coarse and a little bit warmer. In the second episode, Clint (played by Ralf Little), the womaniser in the group of friends, still hasn't heard anything from Abbey, the enigmatic model with the mesmerisingly bad hair extensions. When he does, he decides to throw a dinner party at which he can impress her and, more importantly, persuade his friends to tell her flattering things about him. It all goes badly and predictably awry. His mates slowly tear one another apart as their relationships start to fracture; Babs is furious with her lazy ex-lover, Dickie; while Lillie (a winking, shrugging and twitching Lucy Davis) sounds as if she might be going off the idea of marriage to caring paramedic Eddie (Shaun Dooley).

Talking of cold feet, ever since Cold Feet walked off into deep storage, its sharp comedy-drama footprint has left a conspicuous hole in ITV's schedules. With its clutch of thirtysomething friends and couples, Married Single Other is an obvious attempt to step into that gap. Disappointingly, it's also obvious in less welcome ways. Clint (Ralf Little) is a bit of a womaniser and rather one dimensional in his view of the opposite sex. How do we know? Well, there were clues in the dialogue, which couldn't be accused of excessive subtlety, but the giveaway was the giant poster of a naked woman on all fours that hung over his batch-pad bed.

The poster worked as a symbol of the drama's main shortcoming, an unwillingness to let the audience do any of its own thinking. There were one or two neat exchanges - when Clint mentioned to a failed conquest that he didn't have her number, she replied: "No, but I've got yours." Mostly, though, the story lurched from one scene to the next, hurriedly trying on a weird range of ill-fitting tones, from the mawkish to the melodramatic.

Let's hope the clunking mood shifts are impatient early efforts to establish the characters. In Little, Dean Lennox Kelly and Lucy Davis, the series features actors with plenty of charm. They need to be allowed to slow down and breathe. If it wants to be the next Cold Feet, it has to cool its heels.

The premise is hardly a new one centering around a group of friends dealing with love, lust and something else beginning with L that I can't quite think of at the moment. I had hoped the series would be similar to ITV's drama jewel Cold Feet which will remain one of my favourite series of all time...

Married, Single, Other isn't the new Cold Feet but it manages to be interesting enough to keep me interested. Perhaps the characters aren't quite as likeable if I were to compare the two side by side but there are good levels of drama and humour to make it an easy watch.

It takes its role as a romantic comedy very seriously often turning a little twee and sickly in places where the romance is sometimes shoved down your throat. The opening sequence was a hair away from having hearts and puppies running through a field full of buttercups and that was a little off putting.

The cast is strong with perhaps Amanda Abbington and Dean Lennox Kelly's characters being the most interesting as I feel I can predict where Lucy Davis' character is going to end up and Ralf Little as "Clint" (an attempt at humour that fell flat) seems to be playing himself.

The series isn't quite the jewel I was hoping for but saying that its unfair the judge something based soley on a first episode where the characters need to be introduced and stories laid down but it shows enough promise to become a success.

Married, Single, Other is more obsessed with matrimony than even Iain Duncan Smith. ITV's new six-part comedy drama asks us to consider which is the most natural state for a grown-up - marriage, being single or living together. It is already hurtling towards the conclusion "none of the above". We refer first to Lillie and Eddie, not only because the actors Lucy Davis and Shaun Dooley make them the far most compelling characters, but because they appear to be content, and have been, so we are told several times, for 16 happily unmarried years.

The only tension in the relationship is Eddie's determination to marry Lillie, a desire that manifests itself in ludicrous romantic gestures on her birthdays, on one of which we join them. "May I refer you to the window?" asks Eddie, opening the curtain on a collage of post-it notes that spell "Will You Marry Me?" Eddie, a blameless paramedic and all round good sort, is a sentimentalist, so soppy you hardly realise that towards the end of the episode he has entered the euthanasia debate on the side of do-not-revive.

He is further goaded toward the altar by the neuroses of his 11-year-old son, who in an embellishment the writer Peter Souter should have thought better of, is a child prodigy and speaks in sitcom clever-clever. Joe (Jack Scanlon) is so anxious that his parents do the proper thing he scripts his father's proposal speeches in a scrapbook. Lillie is having none of it, not merely because she is happily in love as she is (which would have done for me) but because she works at a refuge for battered wives. By the end of last night's opener, rather than book Joe into therapy with her mate Babs, she has relented, however. In the Richard Curtis moment we all feared, she proposes to Eddie at her birthday party.

Among the guests are, of course, Babs who is married to a loser called Dickie, although you might want to abbreviate the name. Dickie, an all-night online gambler, get-rich-quick fantasist and biker, is so broadly written that Dean Lennox Kelly does well to make any sense of him at all in his performance. If only Amanda Abbington could have made us see what he sees in the dreary child shrink she plays. Meanwhile, the inveterate Lothario Clint, played by Ralf Little, has fallen for a blonde model called Abbey, played by Miranda Raison who, natch, is not a bimbo after all but well on to him. Clint: "You have only just met me" Abbey: "I have met you a thousand times before."

Where Souter and his executive producer Andy Harries are going dramatically rather than thematically with all this, I am not sure, and maybe that is a good thing. Souter has mentioned Richard Curtis's name and Andy Harries made Cold Feet, still the gold standard for this kind of post-watershed soap. The programme's titles carry the words "married", "single", "other" with boxes next to them and there is more than an element of box ticking in both the piece's premise and execution. The dialogue needs to unclench and the story needs to be given time to grow organically as the characters, one prays, deepen.

It's high time we had a decent comedy-drama to get our teeth into, and this new Monday night six-parter looks like being just the job. With a fine cast of instantly recognisable faces, including Ralf Little, Lucy Davis and ex-Spooks star Miranda Raison, it centres on three decidedly different couples, each with their own distinctive hang-ups. Babs (Amanda Abbington) looks set to dump her loveable but hopeless husband Dickie (Dean Lennox Kelly), while Clint (Little) seems incapable of more than a one-night stand - until gorgeous model Abbey (Raison) walks into his life.

As for Eddie (Shaun Dooley), he still can't persuade partner Lillie (Lucy Davis) to marry him, even after 16 years - but can the couple's youngest son seal the deal for him?