Coupling

Jeff reckons Steve is still in 'The Zone' with Jane: the time after the breakup when there can still be sex, but he wants to date Susan instead. When he has a meal in a restaurant with Jane, Susan walks in.

Susan invites Steve for a date at home, and offers to cook. Jeff warns him about 'The Sock Gap', and Patrick alerts him to her collection of remote controls. Somehow everyone's conversation seems to revolve around Patrick's size, and Jeff is asked by several people to accompany him to the toilet to check.

Jeff explains to the guys about 'The Giggle Loop': the danger that the more you try to suppress laughter in important silences, the harder you want to laugh. Jane's aunt has died, and she wants Steve to come to the funeral, pretending to be her boyfriend still. Susan invites herself, and so Patrick must come as her 'boyfriend', and all six end up going.

Jeff finally gets to speak to Chrissy, the woman on the train whose leg he has been fancying for days, and tells her that he only has one leg, a lie which becomes ever harder to undo. Meanwhile, Sally is dating a "surgeon" called David, and Jeff wonders whether it would be easier.

After watching an embarrassing program on TV with Susan, Steve bumps into his dream celebrity, Mariella Frostrup, in the bar, but it is not the dream encounter he might like, as she pours her drink down his trousers. Jane and Sally's attempt to make friends with her get him into more trouble as he then has to have dinner with Susan's liberal-minded parents, which turns into a nightmare as misunderstandings multiply.

When Steve pops into Susan's flat, he accidentally sees Sally's naked bottom. This incident leads to dilemmas and awkwardness all round, which are dealt with in the classic sequence outlined by Jeff: the prickles (an embarrassed silence), the blurts (talking too fast), followed by the "head laugh".

Steve and Susan have had an argument about their future, and Susan storms out of Steve's flat in tears. While Steve tries repeatedly to ring Susan, his courage failing every time, the girls are locked in a debate over the merits of 1471, and what it means if the phone "chirps". Eventually the tension at both ends of the phone gets too much. The boys and the girls set out for "the Temple of Woman': in the girls' case, a beauty salon; in the boys' case, a lap dancing club.

Jane finds herself competing with the Supreme Being of the Universe and she feels it isn't fair on either of them. Jeff finds himself in the middle when he has to decide to cheat his girlfriend Julia with Wilma or not.

Jeff is still trying to decide whether he should cheat on his girlfriend Julia with Wilma, or not. While his friends try to help him, Jeff is no match in this debate for "devil woman" Wilma. She knows every argument that Susan (the expert in getting her own way) has ever used. Jeff paints himself into a terrifyingly extreme conversational corner, until he blurts out that the reason he can't have sex with Wilma is that his girlfriend is dead...

One bar, three different points of view, the same nine and a half minutes. Susan and Steve are pregnant (mostly Susan), Patrick and Sally are discussing relationships (mostly Sally), and Jane has a blind date - but will his job be a problem? Meanwhile, in the skies above an Aegean island, terrible danger grows.

A phone call between Susan and Sally grows and grows as Steve, Patrick, Oliver and Jane gradually find their way onto the line. Will the phone call ever end?

Since the dawn of time, men and women have been falling in love - and men have been trying to get straight home afterwards. Can fallen playboy Patrick Maitland ever find his way home from the Enchanted Glade of his one true love and get a decent night's kip? Kate Isitt as Sally makes her singing debut.