It was instructive, though ultimately depressing, that the BBC showed the entirety of This Life before the where-are-they-now special last night. Instructive because in nightly, two-episode batches you were reminded how good the show was: the TV equivalent of the Willy Wonka chewing gum that was really a three-course meal.

The series, about young lawyers shagging, lying and house-sharing, was genuinely original: the jerky camerawork, its trademark, was widely copied. The characters — urban, eloquent, middle-class, modern — hadn’t featured on TV drama before. You recognised elements of your life in theirs: drinking, first jobbing, having sex, screwing up, losing it, not committing. There was posh, vulnerable Miles; focused, insecure Milly; slacker Egg; gay Warren and — queen of all — Anna, a Boadicea of the Inns of Court, fabulous and flawed, her character pickled in booze and expletives.

We coveted their big, groovy pad (the electric blue kettle! the boho plates!). It was so of its time, and even when it got popular it maintained its quality. Actually, it got better.

The bar was set high for this reunion, but how could you top the original finale, and Milly decking the villainous Rachel? A Miles and Anna wedding? A Miles and Warren wedding? No, sadly all our balloons were to be utterly pin-pricked. This Life + 10 was terrible. Witless. Insubstantial. Saggy. Navel-gazing. Or, as Anna might have put it in better days, after taking a large gulp of red, “Total f****** b******s.”

Ferdy, Warren’s ex, the gay biker was dead — we weren’t told why — and for some reason Miles (Jack Davenport borrowing Simon Amstell’s hair) had divorced Francesca and married Me-Linh, a Vietnamese model he met while making squillions in Hong Kong. Only Anna (Daniela Nardini) was still a lawyer. Egg (Andrew Lincoln) had somehow become a bestselling author, although we had left him running a drab café. Where was Rachel? Joe and Kira? O’Donnell? These omissions and leaps of character were deliberate — ten years had passed, you gotta roll with it — but too clever. The Lifers in + 10 bore little relation to the characters we knew.

Once you watched This Life and felt stabs of recognition. Now, the characters seem so alien that you struggle to remember why you cared.

But this was less a drama and more a showing-off vehicle for Amy Jenkins, the show’s creator and writer of the reunion: an indulgent, self-congratulatory bid for easy applause from an audience just happy to see old friends again. Jenkins also wished to luxuriate in the culture-moulding brilliance of her creation. So the book that made Egg famous turned out to be the barely fictionalised story of the group. The reunion, at Miles’s house in the country, was the subject of a reality documentary.

These wheezes were totally absurd but they allowed the characters to talk to the camera, and each other, about themselves in the third person. Egg told Mark Lawson that the book had struck a chord because it focused on that period in one’s twenties “when you’re being launched into the world before you become an adult proper”. Well, gee, thanks, but we didn’t want a deconstruction of This Life.

Some drama would have been just dandy. The characters had mutated into ventriloquist dummies for a range of zeitgeisty “ishoos”. Anna and Milly (Amita Dhiri) had fallen out over whether thirtysomething women could have children and a career. Milly had had a baby, and Anna wanted one. Their discussion sounded like a women’s magazine article, not a dingdong between friends.

Not much made sense. Warren (Jason Hughes) was popping pills despite seeming quite cheerful. Out of nowhere Miles was declared bankrupt. As soon as Egg destroyed the reality documentary tapes and renounced his exploitative novel-writing, he and Milly were fine. There was big dancing to classic whinge-rock (Manic Street Preachers’ A Design for Life). As for This Life’s Richard ’n’ Liz, well Miles and Anna had sex, hooray, reaffirmed their love, hooray, then Miles went to Timbuktu. Yes, Timbuktu. The reunion was like that: scattergun, disconnected, the kind of chewing gum that far from yielding a three-course banquet was more the kind that you scraped off the soles of your shoes. The truth is that Jenkins may have created This Life, but the best episodes were written by others, notably Richard Zajdlic.

A bit of the old spark remained. After a row about Iraq (another recycling of newspaper editorials; Miles for invasion, Egg against) Warren tsk-tsked: “Well, really, arguing about the war is so last season.” Suddenly, instead of sounding like cyphers or speechifying trendies, at last one of them sounded like themselves. Guys, let’s leave it for another ten years. Or maybe just leave it. It was nice knowing you — once.

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