'This Life' is truly as bad as it gets. Its cast of mercenary, lascivious, ruthless, duplicitous, shallow characters are intended as a reflection on its post-eighties setting and I have to admit in this regard it is an accurate creation. Unfortunately, it leaves me nothing to sympathise with or care about and I regard it as just another step toward the television premium-rate phone in scams; astonishingly bad, cheap, reality and 'celebrity' saturated television; and other cut and run attitudes that have destroyed this medium and, indeed, much of British society. Sounds exaggerated? I don't think it is. In this regard programs such as 'This Life' have indeed been as influential as they are often called.

Part of what made This Life such a landmark television series was its uncompromising trendiness – its utter refusal to comply with standard dramatic devices. The shaky camera, the rough cuts, the sex and the swearing were genuinely ground-breaking, which is why Amy Jenkins' decision to make a one-off comeback 10 years on has just a tinge of sell-out about it. I suppose this is how die-hard Beatles fans felt when Paul McCartney released the Frog Chorus.Still, getting a glimpse of the whole "what happened next?" thing is always intriguing. In This Life +10 the group of law graduates reunite for gay biker Ferdy's funeral. The cause of his demise remains unexplained (maybe Ramon Tikaram was busy that day) though we do learn that he got it together with Welsh milksop Warren (Jason Hughes) in the years following the end of the series.It is swiftly apparent however that the five original housemates have drifted apart: Anna (Daniella Nardini) is the only practising lawyer and has quickly motored up the ranks of high-class defence attorneys; Miles (Jack Davenport) has acquired a country mansion, a hotel business and a Vietnamese bride; Egg (Andrew Lincoln) has written a best-selling novel based on the gang's experiences and is still with Milly (Amita Dhiri) who has popped a sprog; and Warren is dealing with Ferdy's death admirably thanks to his burgeoning career as a life coach/self help guru.Egg's status as a celebrity author prompts a sexy young filmmaker to organise a reunion between the flatmates at Miles's stately pile as part of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, and this is where the faintly absurd amateur psychology and pent-up tension begins to emerge.But, hey, this is a study in recent social history after all and Jenkins just about gets away with the clichéd set-up largely thanks to the edginess of the group dynamic (which is still as well observed as ever) and the chemistry between Lincoln and Davenport whose old buddy routine provides just about the only realistic friendship of the whole lot of them.Frankly the whole project is little more than an excuse to drum up the old neuroses and insecurities that plague those trying to come to terms with lost youth: Career woman versus housewife? Playboy versus responsible adult? Clapham Common cottager versus weird, over-analysing sperm donor? They are the identity crises that face us all… Still – there is much to enjoy. The soundtrack to Egg's ostentatious cooking routines and the group's booze-fuelled slanging matches has shifted from Massive Attack and Portishead to The Killers and Kaiser Chiefs – the use of contemporary music once again proving integral to This Life's success - but, in a nice conceit, as the action comes to a climax, the whole gang dance around like middle-aged loons to the Manic Street Preachers. Clearly these are nineties children at heart.Whether intentional or not, there is a spooky symmetry between the fates of the characters and their real life alter egos. Miles's success in industry and Egg's fame mirror the career paths of Davenport and Lincoln who clearly didn't need this nostalgic trip down memory lane as much as the others and it is a tribute to their evident respect for Jenkins and the original series that they agreed to the reunion at all.The biggest problem with the show has always been empathy. These people are egotistical, hopelessly unstable and borderline unlikeable - but they perfectly bring out the screwed-up wretch in all of us. One can easily forgive Jenkins her indulgence, for This Life +10 is a triumph of reminiscence and guilty pleasures.

This Life was a very crafty, addictive soap, which kept even skeptics like me interested to the end - and what a delicious, bitter-sweet end it was. The thing that bothers me about this story is the characters - are big-city, professional twenty-somethings really such sad people ? Everything in their lives was so empty and pretentious that it was quite hard to feel any empathy with them at all, and despite the self-conscious realism there was an almost sterile feeling to the production (perhaps this is largely a question of culture-shock for a person who has never been in such an environment - I kept thinking, these people want to get out into the bush a bit more), but the sharp direction and writing swept me along. If only we could get a show which combined good writing, good direction and likeable characters...

This has just finished a repeat of the whole series in the UK, being shown late every week night during the summer. It is amazing it was first shown nearly five years ago and has been finished over three years now. This has brilliant and believable scripts, tight storylines told with economy, all played with great panache.Nearly every actor has gone on to better things, if there could be anything better than this, Jack Davenport to Hollywood films, Daniela Nardini into several very good homegrown dramas and Andrew Lincoln does the voiceovers for about 50% of British ads.The final episode has to be the most satisfying piece of television ever and the final scene of that episode made it into the top 100 TV moments of the Millennium as voted by the UK's Channel 4 viewers.As a piece of British life in the mid-Nineties it will probably become an icon of the period. As a lawyer myself, the legal scenes were spot on, as befits the author's origins. They left this at the top, and rightly so as anywhere from that final scene would have been down hill.