Coupling

Patrick has a cupboard of video tapes of his former girlfriends, not to mention Britt Ekland in The Wicker Man. Jeff is excited, but Steve is appalled, when he realizes that Susan must be amongst them. Susan is also horrified when she realizes this in the company of the other girls. Later on, she arrives at Patrick's, and is outraged at what she finds going on there.

Jeff and co. can't take their eyes of a beautiful stranger in their local bar. And the girl can't take her eyes off Jeff. Jeff goes over to talk to her, only to discover that she doesn't speak a word of English, which to Jeff of course is quite a relief. Her interpreter, Alice, tells Jeff she's Israeli, then whisks her away. The next day the girl is back and Jeff attempts to chat her up. With neither speaking a word of the other's language, it is an utter disaster.

Steve is plunged into total panic when he suspects that Susan has found one of his porn videos. To fill the embarrassing silence, he tells her he loves her, but Susan is well-aware that he was merely panicking. Susan invites all the friends over for a dinner party. Jane brings her therapist, Jill, who everyone assumes is there as Jane's date. In front of everyone, Susan insists that Steve justify his passion for the offending porn film, Lesbian Spank Inferno.

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.

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 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.

Steve and Susan's relationship is drifting into a new phase. They are beginning to get on each other's nerves. A bizarre set of misunderstandings brings on a crisis.

As Jeff's 30th birthday approaches, his new boss Julia Davis questions the girls about whether one should kiss a junior work colleague, while Jeff admits to the lads that he had a close encounter of the Nat (Nose Avoidance Tilt) kind in a stationery cupboard at work.

Patrick has boasted to his business associate, Ivan, amongst other things that he has a wife, and when Ivan comes to the bar, Patrick presses Sally and then Susan into pretending to be his wife. Things turn awkward when Steve proposes to Susan while she is pretending to be faithfully married to Patrick. Meanwhile, Jane is invited on a dinner date by Bill, a man she chatted up in a pub, but makes an unfortunate choice of clothing for the evening.

It's one year since Steve and Susan's first date, and he is dreading questions about their future. And then a wedding invitation drops through their front door. Patrick meets an ex who appears to fail to recognize him.

Jane gets the sack as a traffic reporter for a local radio station, and decides on a new career in children's entertainment. She starts rehearsing with a pink snake hand puppet, which turns out to have an unstoppable ability to tell the bald truth. Patrick is trying to dump his latest girlfriend Lynda, but when she says she's interested in a threesome, he desperately starts backtracking.

Following their disastrous encounter, Patrick seeks reassurance from Steve & Jeff, who explain to him the theory of the Melty Man, and Sally seeks reassurance from Jane & Susan, who try to comfort her with their own "failure" experiences.

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".

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.

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.

Sally is terrified that she might be pregnant, so she takes a pregnancy test and asks the other girls to do the same so that she knows what a negative result looks like. In her fluster she gets the tests muddled up. One of the girls is pregnant, but which one?

Susan has invited everyone over for dinner, which as we know is just asking for trouble. Steve is particularly worried because Susan has recently redecorated the bathroom, and removed the lock, thus robbing him of his Fortress of Solitude. Sally's worry is that Patrick is bringing his new girlfriend: she's frightened that she will overcompensate her feelings of hostility towards her new rival by being embarrassingly nice. Patrick dimly perceives there might be a problem, so has told Jennifer that Sally is a lesbian...

Steve is troubled by a blemish on his bottom, which Susan hasn't noticed. James remembers where he knows Susan from. Jeff and Julia try spicing up their love life, but he loses the key to the handcuffs. Then Julia's chunky ex-boyfriend calls round, and he has to pretend that they're not a couple.

Sally is surprised to say the least when Patrick arrives at her flat at three in the morning to get rid of a spider for her. It turns out that he dreamt her distress call. What can this mean? Does Patrick subconsciously want to protect Sally? More shockingly, does Patrick have a subconscious? Encouraged by their friends, Sally and Patrick independently tell the story of how they first met...

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...

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.

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.

Steve panics at Susan goes into labour, Patrick panics as Sally goes Hulk-style mad after finding out he's slept with Jane, who is oblivious to all the tension and is having a blissful afternoon with Oliver.

Oliver invites Jane to his apartment, not realizing that things such as porn and dirty dishes now replace the floor. Meanwhile Patrick lets the fact slip that he slept with Jane during a conversation with Oliver and Patrick which gets back to Sally. While all the drama unfolds Susan realizes that the pains in her stomach means the baby is finally on his way.

It's time to start attending antenatal classes. Susan need a back-up birth partner, Steve is haunted by the ghost of spanking lesbians past and Sally is seeking the solace of a string quartet. Meanwhile, Jane is trying to find a way to out-keen Oliver.

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.

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?

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.