It could arise from plant metabolism, or the effect of sunlight hitting pine needle surfaces.. Could feet get any colder? At one moment Rachel was exulting over the fact that she and Adam had managed to buy their house. At the next a gravel truck had joined her in the front seat of her car and she was on her way to an appointment with the life-support machine – the television dramatist’s most cherished instrument of torture. By the time the credits rolled, Rachel was wearing a toe tag and a little under 10 million viewers were beginning to come to terms with their grief. They knew the relationship had to end sometime, but they didn’t expect it to be like this, so sudden and so shocking.

And, although Helen Baxendale lives on and was healthy enough to discuss her demise on a recent making-of documentary about the drama (“I don’t really like the idea of dying”), it would be a mistake to dismiss what viewers felt about Rachel’s death as entirely synthetic.The facts of the case tempt you into a disapproving syllogism – since the death is entirely fictional, the emotions it arouses must be too – but that is to miss a crucial point about fiction, which always involves a logical asymmetry. Does this death matter? Not in the slightest, given the real bereavements that occur everyday. Does it affect us? Unquestionably – and in understanding why it does, you understand something about what fiction can do for us – and in particular fictions such as Cold Feet.We’ve been a little hardened by long experience, of course. So far as I know no one has yet sent flowers, as listeners did in large numbers when Grace Archer was killed off by the BBC in order to distract from ITV’s opening-night broadcast. Despite the fact that Cold Feet is ITV’s most popular drama for years, I doubt that the intensity of feeling on Sunday night quite matched that generated by the death of Little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop.”I have never read printed words that gave me so much pain,” wrote the actor William Macready after he had read the instalment that finally delivered that long-expected blow “I could not weep for some time.

Sensations, sufferings have returned to me, that are terrible to awaken.” The Irish MP Daniel O’Connell was so overcome, reading the chapter on a train, that he shrieked “He should not have killed her!” and threw the book out of the window. And while it’s tempting to put such remarks down to Victorian sentimental excess, it’s also true that we’ve become calloused by frequent exposure to fictional death – the cheapest trick in the soap producers’ book.What writers get out of death is pretty clear. After Dickens – a serial killer in a rather literal sense – had finished off Paul Dombey, a satirical magazine of the time ran what purported to be an inquest into the character. Dickens’s testimony was summarised like this: “When he had no more use for a personage, or did not know what to do with it, killed him off at once It was very pathetic and very convenient…

If he was asked to name the disease of which Paul had expired, thought it was an attack of acute ‘don’t-know-what-to-do-with-him phobia’. Had it not supervened, he would have suffered under, and probably succumbed, at last to a chronic infection, technically called ‘being-in-the-way-ism’.”The coroner’s verdict on Rachel would probably be similar: “Died as a result of crush injuries, induced and aggravated by Narrative Fatigue Syndrome and General Inspirational Debility.” A programme as successful as Cold Feet – and as greedy for plotlines – is not easy to maintain, and its creator, Mike Bullen, has made no secret of the burden of finding new crises for his characters to endure. Talking in Cold Feet – the Final Cut the other night, he admitted to the “need for an ending” – a phrase that conjured thoughts of euthanasia.For several series now, Granada and ITV have refused to allow the life-support system to be turned off – the programme was just too lucrative and too popular to make that thinkable. But for Bullen, at least, this counted as a kind of mercy killing, a way of going out with some dignity.