Ferdy sped from pillion to past tense, with not so much as a by-your-leave, and sadly an all-round sense that this was all concept and no content was the only cohesive strand in the 90-minute special which took the characters away from the law and into oblivion.

From the moment born-again hotelier Miles oozed on to the screen, apparently lost en route to the filming of Men Behaving Badly + 10, our spirits were dampened. Anna’s willingness to exchange life at both types of bar for a child did nothing to relight our fire. Perhaps her selecting the world’s worst life coach, the homosexual, recently bereaved, deluded, drug-munching and suicidal Warren to father her offspring was the only real evidence of the inner Anna.

Milly had mutated from bath-taking, boss-screwing über-lawyer into child-raising, career-abandoning über-mother. Egg, transformed from cuckolded sandwich-shop manager to best-selling novelist, was still ploughing from grand gesture to grand gesture to keep her (remember the roses?), and finally deeper than did ever plummet sound, he drowned his book.

The one-off reunion episode, This Life + 10, was couched in Miles’s opulent seat; a stable of improbable fillies and briefly the home of his second wife, the implacable Me Linh, who took flight failing to collect her heir Miles. By the end of the 90 minutes the house had been repossessed and Miles had decided to leave for Timbuktu.

The fact is that there was nothing left to say. The only question we wanted answered was the question pertaining to Anna and Miles but to misquote a line from those other recent queens of the comeback, Take That, in the twist of separation our favourite megalomaniacs had excelled at being me.

This was a ten-year itch that really didn’t need to be scratched and, without a purpose, the characters were left as perhaps what they always were, a bunch of tits but this time without the ass.

The authors are former colleagues at Stephens Innocent, the London law firm rumoured to be the inspiration for This Life

Explore Law

• Corporate Law

• Public Law

• Columnists

• Law Panel

• Student Law

• Law Reports

Times Recommends

• Future Stars of the Bar 2008
• The £60 million makeover: new building, new law lords
• Jobs: be careful how you ring changes