Here was a case of the January blues writ large across broadsheets and tabloids alike. Why did so many feel slighted by This Life + 10? It had been a fair while since such a chorus of objection sounded en mass through the press. Perhaps, for wont of anything else to do in the first week back after the holiday, a bit of sacred cow slaughtering was in order. Perhaps they wanted to remind readers of their straight-talking, no-nonsense credentials.

Yet some of their more specific criticism sounded uncannily like the kind voiced when the series first began. An abhorrence of camera technique, a lack of empathy with the characters, disbelief that anybody really lived their lives in such a decadent manner … these were complaints all trotted out the first time around by the sorts of people who, within 12 months, were celebrating This Life as one of the greatest dramas of the 1990s. Accordingly such protests couldn’t help but ring more than a little hollow.

Others had issues with the way the style and tone of the programme felt hopelessly arcane. This was like criticising an edition of the evening news from 1995 for being out of date, or moaning about Pride and Prejudice sounding old-fashioned. For the episode not to have maintained a stylistic relationship with its parent series would have amounted to a far more genuine misfire. Each of the characters walked and talked in a manner true to their mid-’90s antecedents. Indeed, the fact they were all utterly plausible and thoroughly dimensional the second they appeared on camera was one of the show’s greatest assets.

Resurrecting a TV brand after a lengthy screen absence needs to be done in a way that alienates neither new viewers nor those with only a hazy recollection of history. What can’t happen, but what quite a few seemed to have wanted with + 10, was an opening act stuffed full of obscure references and continuity points dating back over a decade.

Funny how quickly the example of the revived Doctor Who slips from the mind. The same practice was adopted here, which amusingly provoked even more howls of displeasure than were prompted by the way the new model Doctor initially refused to even say he was a Time Lord. “But what happened after Milly punched Rachel?” came the cry. “Where were Kira and Jo?” “Who was living in The House?” The answers to these questions were, quite properly, far away back in 1997. To have opened the episode with a tortuous exposition of just how our principle protagonists got from all the way there to the here and now would have had people switching off in droves.

Instead the reason for their first, haphazard reunion, the funeral of Ferdy, one of their erstwhile housemates, was dispensed with in 60 seconds. The reason for their second, more substantial get-together was born purely out of expediency and not to resolve any 10-year-old unfinished business: to provide content for a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Egg’s latterday writing career.

Initially this seemed, to be sure, a somewhat lazy dramatic conceit. Couldn’t the writer, Amy Jenkins, have concocted a catalyst which revealed more about the state of her characters in 2006 other than simply the intervention of a third party? The first 10 minutes or so suggested the answer was no, and probably compounded whatever disillusionment certain viewers had already brought to the feast.

If, though, you sat down buoyed solely by the pleasure of seeing such a cast together again regardless of circumstances, or merely by the desire to be entertained with a good story, you’ll have stuck with it long past those 600 seconds. Deftly, wittily, as the episode went on the very presence of a third party proved to be the lynchpin around which the cast uncoiled their respective concerns. And ultimately the third party ended up no longer a witness but a willing player in driving the story around its sharply-worded tragicomic twists and turns.

This Life + 10, by definition alone, was about nostalgia and could so easily have fallen into the trap of using that as a be all and end all. Perhaps that’s what some in the press were expecting so fiercely, and which led them to spend all of the show’s running time looking for something that wasn’t there.

A different view would be to see elements of nostalgia present but always lurking slightly out of view, like words running through a stick of rock, forever threatening to be revealed if too much outer layer crumbled. Each character knew it was there, but rather than wield it in front of people’s faces they did their best to digest it on their own terms: again, like real life, and again, real enough to hopefully chime with those possessing knowledge about the show’s legacy from the minute to the cavernous.

And there were plenty of riches here for new and old viewers alike: Anna’s relentless teasing of Miles about his “geisha”, Me-Linh; Egg dancing around the kitchen while cooking; Miles grumpily conceding that not only did he support the Tories at the last election, he did it by postal vote in Hong Kong; Milly falling off a horse; Warren calling Miles “a cunt”; Miles and Anna flirting like two people about to play a fencing match; the all-too-real, all-too-embarrassing mass singalong to A Design For Life.

The crowning glory, however, was the dialogue. So often a decent drama with a fair concept and worthwhile bunch of actors is let down by an appalling script. Not here. Unusually by the standards of today’s TV, the dialogue sparkled from start to finish: “She can’t just leave; someone died here!”, “Your carbon fucking footprint must be the size of a Yeti”, “Fascinating, isn’t it, mastication?”, “Well, it’s too late to play for England, even if I started practicing now”, “All the money and success has turned him into some kind of fuck machine!” And on and on.

Just as the first 10 minutes behaved in a somewhat arch manner, though, so did the last 10: a rather preposterous sequence of revelations which sat at odds with the pace of the bulk of the episode and which, thanks to being compressed into such a short space of time, lost potency through repetition. The sight of yet another person being discovered weeping in their room, or the sound of yet another voice frantically yelling someone’s name from a distance, became blunted by dint of familiarity, which in turn bred contempt. Miles first vowing then actually leaving for Africa in less time than it takes to boil a kettle was a curiously hollow dénouement. Maybe it felt weird by virtue of being, unlike so many episodes from the earlier series, a happy ending.

“This Life is about this life; this one here,” The Guardian pompously stated back in 1997. By nature of its frantic morals, its loose affiliation with the past, its capacity for misinterpretation and defiantly sketchy conclusion, at the very least + 10 provided, to use a loaded phrase, a roadmap for 2007. A shame so many seemed to be reading it the wrong way up.

“We did talk about it,” he said. “We all met, the five of us from the first series, and Amy the writer and Tony Garnett, and they kind of mooted it and kind of polled us on it. We were all up for it – and so we should, because we wouldn’t have careers of any description whatsoever if it wasn’t for that show. 

“The difficult thing is, because Tony Garnett so elegantly killed it at the moment of maximum demand – which is one of his very cool traits as a producer – to find the entry point to revive it, even for an hour, without it looking a bit tacky, is quite difficult. Amy had suggested a couple of things, which were pretty damn good, I have to say. But, nonetheless, it’s really, really difficult. 

“My favourite thing about that show was when it ended, everybody – expect for two characters – was fucking miserable. Well, isn’t that just like life? It’s arguably quite subversive for a television drama to go, ‘Fuck this’. Usually it’s a big old car crash, people not getting what they want. It’s a bit of a kind of a downer.”

He was then asked why, over the last 10 years, demand for the show hasn’t abated.

“It is weird having been in something which is held in that much affection, that much after the event. It’s not like movies, where people carry their love for a particular film around for years and the rest of their lives. Let’s face it, Casablanca it ain’t. 

“It’s just a series about a load of lawyers with shit haircuts and terrible jumpers. But, you know it’s still written about … you guys [journalists] refer to it all the time! But nobody saw it – not really. It was on BBC2, and it got five million people. That’s less than one in 10 of this country. No-one else has ever fucking seen it. 

“To be honest with you, to begin with, never had a show been so roundly ignored. When it was first broadcast, there was no advertising – but that was actually part of the brilliance of it. Nowadays, Channel 4 have these huge billboards in Vauxhall. I can see why they do it, but I don’t know about you, sometimes that makes me much more resistant to watching a show. ‘Don’t fucking tell me what to watch. If I find it, I find it. If I don’t, I don’t’. 

“So This Life just completely slipped into the schedules, late. Pretty late at night. And no-one watched it. The reason I think it picked up is somehow we got recommissioned, and they re-ran the first series and then went straight into the second. They showed it twice a week. We were on television twice a week for 32 weeks. Now that’s a lot of television. We beat people over the head! People could not avoid it after a while. 

“But the writing was fantastic, let’s not forget that. I’m being a bit facetious. It’s the Holy Grail in TV to make something that’s relevant to ABC1s, and it was, because everyone loves to see things about themselves, basically, and not feel patronised. It’s a high-risk thing to do – something that talks about ‘contemporary issues’ without sounding like a public information film. I don’t know how they managed to pull it off, but they did. 

“We had it all. We had sex, we had disease, we had homosexuality, we had lesbians, we had robbery – you name it. And it didn’t feel like some issue-led, pious, holier-than-thou show. And maybe that’s why it’s endured.”

“One of the group has become a commercial success after writing a book based on their friendship and a TV production company is keen to film the group’s reunion.”

Whilst I loved the original series, I’m not entirely thrilled by the prospect, especially since it is going to be in the form of a 90-minute film rather than a new series. Part of the attraction of the show was the slow burn – like any drama series the storylines that ebbed and flowed from week to week, the sexual tension between Anna and Miles; the lack of such with Milly and Egg; and Warren (later Ferdy) stuck in the middle. Although there is something seductive in finding out what happened after the glorious finale, I can’t help but feel that whatever Jenkins has in mind can only be less thrilling that what we of a certain age all have in our collective imagination.

Over the short form, and with a reunion plotline it’ll have to work wonders not to spend much of its duration explaining how they were broken assunder. Films that have previously used this formula such as Peter’s Friends, The Big Chill and Return of the Secaucus 7 have very clearly demonstrated that this is just one of a number of reunions and that they’ve stayed in touch. This seems like the best policy here, although it’s a shame that the new episode won’t simply supply a slice of the character’s lives now rather than creating a “special event” drawing them back together.

There’s some muffled, indistinct but obviously British pop music murmuring in the background – could it be Tindersticks? – and various half-empty bottles of wine resting self-consciously in the foreground. The picture is murky and flickering, as if lit entirely by scented candles, and keeps flipping erratically between long shots, close shots, and ridiculously close-up close shots. There is talk – chattering and shouting, hysterical laughter and knowing insults, whispered asides and intimate confessions. Chopped vegetables, joints, huge sofas, wooden floors, suits and ties and offices and courtrooms and endless legal-speak. At last - This Life is on the telly again.

BBC2 have began a full run of both series back to back. They’ve promised to show an episode every weekday after Newsnight; so already after just one week we’re almost half way through the first series. This is a cunning ruse, no doubt conceived to attract that wandering late-night audience who stay up watching the TV as a way of putting-off going to bed ahead of another working day tomorrow. It’ll pull in more viewers than The Late Show (which also went out virtually every weeknight) ever did; and the scheduling typifies a kind of tactic adhered to by the emerging digital channels – assuming a week has now become too long for an audience to wait to see something they’ve already seen once before. So we’ve got This Life here, every day, in one sense merely a useful alternative to the Euro 2000 highlights packages on at this hour on both BBC and ITV.

Never mind; so far, the rate that these repeats are being shown has thrown up all kinds of amusing observations that you couldn’t have noticed before watching each episode a week apart. With the unfolding of plotlines all squashed and kaleidoscoped and accelerated it’s been telling to see how almost every night this week a character has asserted boldly in response to some half-hearted complaint or gesture: “but this is the ’90s!”. Our five heroes, our acquaintances and mates and role-models (how tempting still to watch it as some kind of parallel to your own experiences of house-sharing and life post-university), are meticulously sketched in this first batch of episodes – Warren, Milly, Anna, Egg and Miles (those last two names still look unforgivably stupid written down) all seem utterly real and believable right from the start.

Of course it’s doubly fascinating watching this knowing how all the characters go on to evolve and collide and how a lot of the assumptions and traits they’re given at the start are totally undermined by the end; Milly is even a bit likeable in these early episodes, Miles seems abhorrent, and it’s hard to fathom the route Egg will take from naïve bumbling fool to wronged, helpless innocent victim who will end up warranting so much sympathy from the viewer. Anna’s more tolerable and genuinely amusing at this stage; while it is Warren above all who is the rock, the foundation and dispenser of wisdom, easily the most experienced and mature of the five to begin with – the fact that he too will undergo such a massive fall and change in personality from how he is now adds to these episodes’ tantalising appeal.

All of the principal actors seem to know exactly who they are and how to play their characters from the very first scene; these repeats confirm again the talents of the production team (all overseen by the genius Tony Garnett) in assembling a uniformly excellent cast right from the start. Amusing too to recall in retrospect how these five would go from being seen as typifying obscure and lamented clichés (original press coverage of series one was relentlessly hostile – not so much, “what is this?” as “what is this doing on BBC2?”) to acutely important emblems of a modern Britain (four page Observer features on the end of series two), only to end up disappearing into a variety of degrees of success (Jack Davenport all over the place; Andrew Lincoln doing voice-overs for Euro 2000 …)

As witty, surprising, addictive, intriguing and horrific as it was four years ago (it’s the first time the original series has been shown on terrestrial TV since 1996) This Life is above all about the now, its characters and plotlines revolving around dilemmas entirely to do with the present. Without any political or social concerns cluttering up the narrative, the whole series can move through time and appear just as contemporary and fresh today (save, of course, or the endless loops of Britpop).

The decor of their legendary house hasn’t dated (yet); neither have the various basic moral and social dilemmas the series seems to address. Egg states in the opening minutes of the first episode how “theories don’t matter” anymore; this is Amy Jenkins, the series creator and chief writer, signaling the agenda for the forthcoming 30 odd episodes: no polemicising and angry railing against the condition of modern society here. It’s significant that the series was first shown on BBC2 the week after the end of Peter Flannery’s spectacular Our Friends in the North which was entirely to do with theories and political polemic and how personal relationships are affected by time and changing social climates. Yet here in 2000, This Life is still this life because society hasn’t really moved on or progressed at all from 1996; the concerns and attitudes (or lack of them) and the humour, cynicism and self-deprecation the series presents as rife in the last drawn-out year of the Major Government don’t seem in anyway different to any such similar tangible mood of this new decade. One of the most important, groundbreaking and enjoyable TV series of the 1990′s, This Life remains a joy to watch and this repeat run is to be unequivocally cheered.

“Outstanding.”