Girls, you're <i>so</i> Nineties

There's nothing wrong with mumsy, but that's not what Sex And The City was ever about. To make matters worse, in the new series there are babies everywhere: Miranda's new one, the ones Charlotte can't have and the ones Samantha doesn't want.

Then up pops the delectable Aidan, Carrie's ex, with a baby strapped to his chest as a sweet reminder of all that she lost when they split up. You see, that's one of the problems. When Sex And The City first started, we had no idea who these actors were, so we were able to suspend disbelief about their characters.

They were absolutely believable and we could paste lots of our own personality and problems onto them, too.

Now I've seen so many pictures and stories about Sarah Jessica Parker, who plays Carrie, and the joys of her real-life marriage and motherhood, it is impossible for me to think of her as a sexy singleton searching for love.

The scene where a supposedly reluctant Carrie holds Miranda's little boy is a dead giveaway. Carrie clutches the baby in the way she used to clutch her Hermes handbag - to her heart. She has 'Mum' written all over her.

Carrie's new love interest is Jack Berger, who appeared briefly at the end of the last series. At the start of the new one, he's more lentil burger than Big Mac, but we'll just have to wait and see if he fills out into something more than the stereotypical refusenik who is reluctant to commit.

The new sex interest for Samantha, a stockbroker called Chip, is so wooden he makes David Beckham look articulate.

One of the real problems with this series is that times have changed and the show hasn't.

It's stuck in a time warp. What we forget is that Sex And The City first appeared in 1994 as a column in the New York Observer, a brilliant, fresh and funny narrative to the world of liberated women.

Since then even the author, Candace Bushnell, has found a husband and, to be brutally honest, the girls in the series ain't gals no more.

When Charlotte wrinkles her cute little forehead, it stays wrinkled. Samantha looks exhausted and Miranda's perpetual crossness has given her more lines than a rhinoceros.

In the now familiar brunch scenes, the Sex And The City friends look less like girls who snack and more like St John's Wood ladies who lunch.

And the mixing of motherhood and singleton just doesn't work - it's hard to make us still believe these are young women at the peak of their predatory powers.

The jokes are as tired as the girls, who are now about as convincingly youthful as Fleetwood Mac. I used to love the scenes where Samantha would try out the latest non-surgical facelift or peel, with disastrous results.

In one episode she went to a plastic surgeon. With a felttipped pen he circled all the parts of her body that needed work. Turning around, she was covered in red rings.

That's funny when you're 30, but less amusing when you're fortysomething and watching your bottom slide down the back of your thighs.

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf argued recently that Sex And The City was the 'first global female epic to answer the question posed in Virginia Woolf's famous essay, A Room Of One's Own. What will women actually do when they are free?'

If the series is anything to go by, what women actually do is whinge, shop (for frocks and for blokes), have mediocre sex and live in a constant state of disappointment, dreaming and plotting-about how to lose their freedom and ensnare some poor reluctant bloke in marriage. Tell me, what kind of liberation is that?

Sexually, Sex And The City is now setting the clock back 20 years. And despite the promise that this will be the raunchiest series yet, the sex, like the men, is pretty two-dimensional.

Even in the most explicit scenes, it's panting by numbers.

Charlotte and her Jewish lover were never out of bed in episode one, but it's about as erotic as a seduction scene between Barry and Janine in EastEnders. (And why do these fabulously sexually liberated women always wear their bras in bed?)

At the end of the last series, Carrie concluded that in the romantic life of the (late) thirtysomething New Yorker: 'Some people are settling down, some people are just settling and some people will only settle for the best.'

I'm afraid to say we've had the best of Sex And The City, and I for one won't settle for anything less.