Best foot forward

The fifth series of Cold Feet starts on Sunday, and Mike Bullen, the series' creator, says it will be the last. He tells Louise Jury why he's moving on

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.

Now, he is grateful that everyone has accepted his plea – even if the decision will distress millions of fans who have repeatedly voted it a winner. 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. Bullen has enormous respect for him because, he says, Cold Feet had some dark storylines for a comedy-drama, from abortion to testicular cancer. Even now, with the final series about to start and its denouement a closely guarded secret, the rumour mill has suggested that Adam's cancer may return, in what would be a downbeat concluding note. It is said that the funerals of four of the central characters have been filmed to fox any potential leak of what happens in the end.

Bullen thinks audiences have guts that television executives don't always have. "It took bravery to back us, but it paid off with audiences," he says. "Reviews of the first series said, 'This series is a puppy wanting to be loved', but I never saw it like that."

Bullen believes that the series' success has lain as much in the material that has been thrown out as in the writing that has remained in the finished scripts, but he points out that it would have had much longer to develop in America. Even after five series, Cold Feet will have run to only 30 episodes in total, which would be one and a bit series in the US. "The thing that Americans do that we haven't yet learnt is, they have series of 22 episodes."

It is one of the reasons that, in his opinion, although Britain produces some good drama, the best television comes from America. "They still show us the way to go – Six Feet Under, Sopranos, West Wing – the usual suspects."

The problem is that commissioners always want to make people laugh on the first page, he says. "But the best laughs come out of character. Thirty minutes of witty one-liners won't be as satisfying an experience as one episode of Frasier."

Alongside the concluding Cold Feet, Bullen is working on two new series, born of the life dilemmas of his friends as they are now. The first is called Life Begins. "I've got a handful of women friends who are moving into their forties and their marriages are breaking up, and, having thought that their lives were sorted, they all feel as if they're just going back to square one. So I'm working on an idea, that hopefully Caroline Quentin will do, of a woman going through that process."

The other idea, called George the Third, is about a man in his mid-forties. "It's about this guy who would have hoped to have his life sorted at his age, but it's just becoming more confused. I've always looked at people slightly older and thought, 'When I get to that age, that's when it will become easier.' But I've realised it never does."

After those, he fancies writing a psychological thriller or a detective series, because he loves them. He would also love to write a film, but probably won't. "I don't want to spend a year of my life writing a crappy British movie – there seem to be so many of them. I really admire Richard Curtis, but he seems to be the only British writer who can consistently do movies at present."

In the meantime, he looks set to continue his working relationship with Granada and ITV – working from Australia, where he moved with his family last year.

Although he has written for ITV and the BBC in the past and insists he is happy to do so in future, Bullen, a man manifestly incapable of self-interested diplomacy, suggests that the BBC has lost its way. He criticises its "wretched empires of managers like a Soviet-bloc country" and thinks that, whereas it once had all the best series, that is no longer the case. "It used to be very distinct from ITV, and you knew what the purpose was. Now, they seem to be doing the same thing – like political parties," he says.

"But the BBC is a publicly funded body – you wonder why we're paying for it. They have series that have made me cringe, such as the dreadful Being April, which you felt had been dreamt up by focus groups. They should have more balls than that."

The fifth series of 'Cold Feet' starts on Sunday on ITV1 at 9pm