A Thing Called Love (BBC1)

Boys will be boys when it comes to love and sex. One minute they're saying that love is "the light that never goes out" and the next bonking some girl they've picked up in a bar half-an-hour previously.

A Thing Called Love, a new six-part series penned by Common As Muck writer William Ivory, treads pretty familiar territory as a group of friends mix and mate and argue and break up and do all the usual things we expect in this type of drama.

Nothing very original in that and, although the series is set in Nottingham, it could take place anywhere you find young, single people.

Robbie is skating on thin ice when he proposes to his beloved on one knee on an ice skating rink to the tune of Bolero (but without a guest appearance by Torvil and Dean).

Gary, on the other hand, appears to have a fear of commitment - or maybe he's just not in love with girlfriend Melanie, who's been hinting that she wants to get engaged for some time.

Their other friend, Kelvin, is married with two children but thinks nothing of playing away from home.

A night out drinking changes everything. Gary doesn't believe in sleeping around ("I'm with someone," he tells the girl who virtually throws herself at him) and even tries to dissuade newly-engaged Robbie from sleeping with a woman who's not his fiancee. "Who do you think you are, me mum?," he asks Gary.

The difference this time is that Gary does have sex with another woman and insists on telling Melanie. As she's expecting him to propose, after finding a ring in his pocket, this comes as something of a shock.

"It ain't vivid for us any more," he tells her, showing an interesting turn of phrase when dumping her.

A Thing Called Love passes an hour of your time pleasantly enough without being earth-shattering in any way. I felt I'd been there many times before. This has nothing new or outstanding to offer. Certainly not the "bold new drama" as which it was billed.

The casting does nothing to dispel this sense of deja vu as most are familiar from other series. Look, there's Ben Miles from Coupling and Chris Gascoyne, who played love rat Peter Barlow in Coronation Street. And there's Kaye Wragg from No Angels and The Lakes. Not to mention Roy Barraclough, also from the Street, and Karl Collins, late of The Bill.

Former EastEnders actor Paul Nicholls has a certain affable charm as Gary, whose quest for love is clearly going to be fraught with difficulties as he waits for perfection instead of enjoying what he can get. Quite where he'll get with chat-up lines like "I can see right inside you, it's lovely", I'm uncertain.