When 40's naughty but not very nice.

CHANNEL 4's new drama series 40 opened with a totally naked Eddie Izzard standing, arms outstretched, on the roof of a tall building somewhere in London. Goodness knows what the neighbours thought.

This stark, not to say stark naked, opening signalled that 40 intended to be tough and uncompromising. We weren't disappointed as the following hour included a man who got turned on by women with scars, lots of effing and blinding, and a murder.

There is more of the same to follow tonight and tomorrow at the same time. How I longed for the return of naughty but nice Graham Norton's chat show which usually occupies the slot. 40 is grim and unrelenting, daring the viewer to look and listen at the unpleasant things being paraded in front of them.

Bryan Elsley's story centres of a group of people preparing for a school reunion. I don't know what they were like as pupils, but they're a crazy, mixed-up bunch as adults. Izzard's Ralph and Hugo Speer's Robert took centrestage in the first episode. Ralph, when not parading his privates on the London skyline, takes drugs and swears a lot. He's trying to get back with a former lover who's been trying to get pregnant. Robert is married with two teenage daughters but is more interested in the female asylum seeker, and her scars, that he brings home.

The series is cast up to the hilt - Kerry Fox, Joanne Whalley, Mark Benton, Vincent Regan and Nimmy March as well as Izzard and Speer - but can hardly be described as easy or relaxed viewing. First Wives, on the other hand, was pure tabloid TV as rejected wives, some famous and some not, dissed husbands who had walked out on them. I had a sneaky admiration for David Bowie's ex, Angie, whose divorce settlement gagged her from talking about their marriage for ten years. Once the time was up, she wrote a kiss and tell book. She wanted revenge and she got it. Her story about finding husband Bowie and Mick Jagger in bed together delighted the tabloids. The damage was done before the revelation that they hadn't slept together, merely crashed out on the bed together.

Other wives found pleasure in taking the scissors to the clothes of their adulterous other half (cutting the flies out of his trousers was particularly rewarding psychologically for Ruth) or pouring tins of white emulsion paint over their husband's car, parked outside the house of his mistress. "I felt really great for about a week, then I needed another fix," recalled Lady Sally Moon. So she took it out on her hubby's £1,000-a-time Savile Row suits.

These are the things that make the headlines. Sometimes the abandoned wife suffers behind closed doors. Madeline found herself alone after 28 years of being one half of a couple. She couldn't sleep, she lost weight, as she grieved for the end of her marriage. "It would have been less painful if they'd died," she said.