Cold Feet: The end of the affair

Smug middle-class must-see or the most compelling drama of our time? Either way, Thomas Sutcliffe knows why 'Cold Feet' had to be killed off

Could feet get any colder? At one moment Rachel was exulting over the fact that she and Adam had managed to buy their house. At the next a gravel truck had joined her in the front seat of her car and she was on her way to an appointment with the life-support machine – the television dramatist's most cherished instrument of torture.

The agony didn't last long, though. By the time the credits rolled, Rachel was wearing a toe tag and a little under 10 million viewers were beginning to come to terms with their grief. They knew the relationship had to end sometime, but they didn't expect it to be like this, so sudden and so shocking. And, although Helen Baxendale lives on and was healthy enough to discuss her demise on a recent making-of documentary about the drama ("I don't really like the idea of dying"), it would be a mistake to dismiss what viewers felt about Rachel's death as entirely synthetic.

The facts of the case tempt you into a disapproving syllogism – since the death is entirely fictional, the emotions it arouses must be too – but that is to miss a crucial point about fiction, which always involves a logical asymmetry. Does this death matter? Not in the slightest, given the real bereavements that occur everyday. Does it affect us? Unquestionably – and in understanding why it does, you understand something about what fiction can do for us – and in particular fictions such as Cold Feet.

We've been a little hardened by long experience, of course. So far as I know no one has yet sent flowers, as listeners did in large numbers when Grace Archer was killed off by the BBC in order to distract from ITV's opening-night broadcast. Despite the fact that Cold Feet is ITV's most popular drama for years, I doubt that the intensity of feeling on Sunday night quite matched that generated by the death of Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop.

"I have never read printed words that gave me so much pain," wrote the actor William Macready after he had read the instalment that finally delivered that long-expected blow. "I could not weep for some time. Sensations, sufferings have returned to me, that are terrible to awaken." The Irish MP Daniel O'Connell was so overcome, reading the chapter on a train, that he shrieked "He should not have killed her!" and threw the book out of the window. And while it's tempting to put such remarks down to Victorian sentimental excess, it's also true that we've become calloused by frequent exposure to fictional death – the cheapest trick in the soap producers' book.

What writers get out of death is pretty clear. After Dickens – a serial killer in a rather literal sense – had finished off Paul Dombey, a satirical magazine of the time ran what purported to be an inquest into the character. Dickens's testimony was summarised like this: "When he had no more use for a personage, or did not know what to do with it, killed him off at once. It was very pathetic and very convenient... If he was asked to name the disease of which Paul had expired, thought it was an attack of acute 'don't-know-what-to-do-with-him phobia'. Had it not supervened, he would have suffered under, and probably succumbed, at last to a chronic infection, technically called 'being-in-the-way-ism'."

The coroner's verdict on Rachel would probably be similar: "Died as a result of crush injuries, induced and aggravated by Narrative Fatigue Syndrome and General Inspirational Debility." A programme as successful as Cold Feet – and as greedy for plotlines – is not easy to maintain, and its creator, Mike Bullen, has made no secret of the burden of finding new crises for his characters to endure. Talking in Cold Feet – the Final Cut the other night, he admitted to the "need for an ending" – a phrase that conjured thoughts of euthanasia.

For several series now, Granada and ITV have refused to allow the life-support system to be turned off – the programme was just too lucrative and too popular to make that thinkable. But for Bullen, at least, this counted as a kind of mercy killing, a way of going out with some dignity. And death – as in so many soaps – not only cuts the contractual knot, it also delivers an unfailing emotional jolt. This is peculiarly true of soaps, which have no obvious narrative punctuation but flow into an indeterminate future. Death is as close as most soaps ever come to a full stop – which is why Coronation Street and EastEnders have also recently been raising the body count.

Bullen declared that he felt no sadness at all at the demise of Cold Feet, and little but pride for the episode in which Rachel is scattered to the winds. But I doubt that he could have written the scene so effectively without feeling some kind of grief himself. Dickens famously found the writing of Little Nell's death an agonising process – one in which sentimental excitement and anguish were combined. Flaubert, too, experienced genuine physical distress when he had to write about the death of Madame Bovary – as if his famous claim of identity with the character had some physiological grounding.

And that's largely because it isn't simply a figure of speech to say that some fictional characters come to life. Over the course of Cold Feet's evolution – from a pilot that appeared to have crash-landed (it was only after it won the Golden Rose of Montreux that ITV realised it might be a good idea to show it when the audience was actually awake), to a pillar of the weekend schedules – Rachel had evolved and changed. Indeed, for quite a sizeable component of the audience, she had accompanied them through the major life-changes they had experienced themselves – so her premature death (rather more plausible in its brutality than some of the twists necessary to keep her alive) may well have come as an unnerving memento mori.

One reason for Cold Feet's success as a television series was that it allowed its audience to rehearse their own experiences – and to rehearse them in both senses of the word. Watching the programme, with its carousel of betrayals and life-changes, viewers could revisit the dramas of their own lives and prepare for those that were yet to come.

And, in this respect, death in fiction is particularly potent. Macready's acknowledgement that "sufferings have returned to me, that are terrible to awaken" is pertinent here – because no fictional death can be divorced from those that we've already survived or those that are yet to come. When you watch a memorial service on screen, as millions will this coming Sunday (and in all likelihood several millions more than would have watched "life as usual" – death always draws a crowd), you're also watching that of people you love and you're watching your own – with that delicious masochism that makes us all fantasise at some time about how we might be mourned.

It would be easy to dismiss this as emotionally cannibalistic – a morbid indulgence in sentiment, which discredits the real thing. But that view wouldn't really do justice to the suspended disbelief that makes fiction possible. Besides, for many devoted fans of Cold Feet, Rachel and Adam and Karen and David were probably more significantly present as human beings than their own distant relatives. They saw them more often and knew more about their desires and weaknesses. This is even truer of long-running soaps, where the acquaintance of the viewers may stretch out over decades. And while you might wish that people would spend more time with real people rather than fictional ones, you can't sensibly deny that the inventions come to occupy an important psychological space in people's lives. When they disappear – suddenly breaking the rules of a narrative that appears to promise they won't – the sense of loss isn't merely an illusion. A continuity has been broken.

Death is peculiarly potent in this respect, because it allows us to rehearse the feelings that we least want to experience in life. And such rehearsals can have genuine effects on flesh-and-blood relationships. One of the more notable fictional film deaths of recent years, that of Gareth in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, was described by Simon Callow, the actor who played him, as "one of the most useful events in the evolution of people's attitudes to homosexuality". Lured into liking a gay character who was safely fictional, some cinema-goers were startled to find that they minded when he collapsed and died, and that others on screen minded very much too. "I had letters which said 'I never realised gay people had normal feelings'," Callow said. What these correspondents meant was that they never realised they could have normal feelings about gay people until the film had forced them to rehearse. (The film wouldn't have worked nearly as effectively, incidentally, had it been A Funeral and Four Weddings – we had to get to know and look forward to Gareth before he was taken from us.)

Four Weddings and a Funeral involves a famous moment of emotional manipulation – when Auden is drafted in to give unique expression to a universal sentiment of loss. The fact that his poem then became a standard reading at real funerals is instructive about the interchange between fiction and real life – a border that is ill-policed at the best of times, but never quite as porous as when death is involved.

It will be interesting to see whether Mike Bullen can rise to the occasion as Rachel's ashes drift away across the coast of Snowdonia this coming Sunday. But the tears that will undoubtedly flow won't be factitious, even if the script isn't perfect. Viewers will be saying goodbye not just to a character they cared about, but also to a drama that played a part in their lives – one that effectively blurred the line between the stories we inhabit (and can't control) and the ones we watch (and know that someone can). I will find the healing process relatively easy myself – but for those who currently feel inconsolable I can only say this. You may not feel like it right now – but there will come a time when you enjoy someone else's death just as much.

The final episode of 'Cold Feet' is on ITV1 on Sunday at 9pm

Gripping yarns: the shows that kept the chattering classes glued to the box

By John Walsh

The Forsyte Saga 1967

The first BBC drama to keep the country indoors on Sunday evenings. Written in 26 parts with cliffhanger endings, it offered a performance of magnificent nastiness from Eric Porter as wife-raping Soames.

The Six Wives of Henry VIII 1970

Six wives, six episodes, six handsome history lessons. Henry, played by Keith Michell, was a charismatic, dashing figure easily enraged by hints of treachery – of which there were many.

I, Claudius 1976

Debauchery at the Imperial court in ancient Rome. Its pedigree (from two novels by Robert Graves), dramatis personae (despots and madmen) and plots (bloody violence, Rabelaisian orgies and feasting), plus Derek Jacobi in the lead, meant it couldn't fail.

Bouquet of Barbed Wire 1976

Incestuous passions in Surrey as Frank Finlay watches his dreamboat daughter Prue (Susan Penhaligon) fall for the oily charms of the American intruder Gavin. Finlay's exophthalmic stare and Penhaligon's bee-stung pout were the talk of the nation.

The Jewel in the Crown 1984

An everyday story of Indian folk and nervous British expatriates in wartime Mayapore, Jewel gave viewers a warm bath of nostalgia followed by a bracing douche of race hatred and violence.

Thirtysomething 1989-92

Two ad men, their wives and three singles drifted in and out of affairs, work upsets and, indeed, life. Most of the audience was the same age as the characters, and howled with empathy.

The Darling Buds of May 1991-93

The ultimate escapist fantasy, from the books of HE Bates. David Jason starred as the carefree, Dionysian rustic Pop Larkin, for whom life was "perfick". Al fresco lunches, days of endless sunshine, Catherine Zeta Jones: what's not to like?

This Life 1996-97

Written by Amy Jenkins, it offered a view of life at work and play in young-lawyer land. Said life was filled with drugs, sex and much edgy banter.

Monarch of the Glen 2000-present

This weekly bulletin about the living hell of inheriting a castle in Scotland appeals to day-dreaming urbanites everywhere. Gorgeous views, female visitors setting their caps at the sulky young laird, and the demise of Richard Briers in a decoy-duck explosion.