This is the way we live now

Three years ago the critics were celebrating the reincarnation of the amoral adventuress Becky Sharp in Andrew Davies's BBC adaptation of Vanity Fair. The triumph of cunning and materialism as told by Thackeray was, we were told, a very modern theme. Journalists strove to identify our contemporary Beckys. This sub-literary chatter petered out, however, when someone noticed that Cold Feet, a contemporary comedy-drama being shown opposite it on ITV, was commanding some two million more viewers.

The final figures are not in yet, but I would be amazed if last night's debut of the fourth series of Cold Feet on ITV1 had not similarly trounced the second instalment of BBC1's The Way We Live Now, an equally meticulous Davies serialisation (in these secular times, a Davies classic serial is as sure a portent of Christmas as Advent Sunday). The discussions about who precisely Trollope's anti-hero Augustus Melmotte anticipated - in the actor David Suchet's interpretation, the answer is a little too obviously Robert Maxwell - will, I predict, similarly end. For the third autumn running, Britain is incubating Cold Feet fever.

Stuffy schoolmasters and dusty librarians will probably take the nation's rejection of a Victorian classic in favour of the soap-operatics of three Mancunian thirtysomething couples as symptomatic of dumbdowned times. To sweeten the pill of period drama, last week's Omnibus special - so special, in fact that, from its exile on BBC2 it was allowed back on BBC1 - took care to argue Trollope's contemporary relevance. The way we live now, we were told, is much the way they lived then. This too is the age of ambition and artifice. In an interview, Suchet submitted the following pr?cis of Trollope's themes: " Money, money, money, passion, power, politics."

These certainly are eternal obsessions. Those masterfitters of facts to theory, the evolutionary biologists, can explain exactly why. Yet I wonder if it is really within the cockpits of finance and politics that the true drama of most lives is now fought?

Does anyone following the BBC serial really identify with the self-seeking Sir Felix as he plots to marry Marie, Melmotte's dwarfish daughter, for her money? Does any woman see her own predicament reflected in Marie's? Does anyone, unless he is a peculiarly self-enlightened version of Jonathan Aitken or Jeffrey Archer, recognise himself in the grotesque party-thrower Augustus Melmotte?

I ask because the same question can be posed in reverse to Cold Feet's adherents. Does anyone who watches regularly not identify with at least one of its characters. When last year I interviewed John Thomson, who plays the chubby loser Pete, I suggested that while most men would aspire to be the insouciant Blarney Stone-swallower Adam - and while I was temperamentally closest to the dimwit public school victim David - Britain was actually a nation of Petes.

The game can equally well be played by women. Are you the foxy but barren Rachel? Or the frustrated middleclass intellectual Karen, bored to drink by her dim spouse? Or Jenny, plainspeaking, oppressed by motherhood? The weekend after my Thomson interview was published, I was flattered to notice that ITV was trailing the next instalment with the teaser: "Which One Are You?"

When Cold Feet started in 1998, after its pilot the year before, its main theme resonated loudly with me. These were indeed three couples with cold feet who had taken the plunge into monogamy and parenthood reluctantly and too late. I saw this as the story of my generation, born circa 1960. Fearful of unemployment and dazzled by consumerism, we were too busy working to settle down at an age when nature gave us the strength to raise children (and I mean literally raise them - as in into their car seats).

Since then, Cold Feet's creator Mike Bullen has scrupulously followed the narrative logic of his premise. His Cold Feeters now have itchy feet and burned fingers. He throws at his characters all the bad things that can happen to good relationships. In previous years we have seen the anguish caused by infidelity, impotence and infertility. This season the characters face the hazards thrown up by miscarriage, alcoholism and a late-flowering career. Sustaining relationships looks as hard as ever. Yet there is nothing each protagonist wants more than old-fashioned domestic bliss.

To me, Jenny's plot line is particularly interesting. Tonight we shall see her torn between accepting a promotion at work that would translate her to New York and staying with Pete, who believes he has been forgiven for his transgressions but is determined not to leave Manchester. Jen's career success is shown clearly as a consolation prize for her failed marriage. Her story faintly recalls the history of one of the Melmottes of our age, the late Jimmy Goldsmith, a dashing young man who eloped with his bride, endured her cruelly early death and, his heart cauterised, transformed himself into a crude and bloated plutocrat who meddled in politics. He died wealthy and, as far as we know, happy. But to sentimental outside eyes his story was a tragedy.

What Bullen understands is that most of us now judge ourselves not by our bank balances but by our emotional wealth. It is in the realm of the intimate that we expend most of our emotional energy and meet our greatest challenges.

Falling in love, staying in love, staying together are the great dreams of our age. The crass pursuit of wealth that disfigured the 1980s now truly looks like an aberration of a previous age, parodied by the getrichquick non-sequiturs of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and the National Lottery.

The Cold Feet generation may not be good at sustaining relationships, but it is sincere in its pursuit of them and our sincerity, our good faith - not our greed - is our Achilles' heel. Most of us are soppy incompetents, not predatory swindlers. Cold Feet sympathises with our dilemmas. It even finds them charming. Truly it understands the way we live now.