Play for Today: Never Too Late review – Soapy, staid and lightweight. Is nostalgia all this returning institution has to offer?

Ah, they don’t make them like they used to. But props to Channel 5 for trying. Play for Today, the landmark BBC series that ran from 1970 to 1984, helped establish the careers of writers and directors such as Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, Caryl Churchill, Dennis Potter and Ken Loach, took on subjects from the Troubles to race, class and camping trips, and gave emerging actors, from Ray Winstone to Brenda Blethyn to Helen Mirren, a proper platform. In resurrecting such a British institution, then, Channel 5 has already generated enough goodwill to withstand a choppy first instalment. And choppy it really is. While a warm, wistful glow envelops Never Too Late, a romcom about growing old and finding flashes of your flame, the result is soapy and staid, with the characters broad sketches working overtime for laughs.

In a story written by Lydia Marchant and Simon Warne, former EastEnders’ star Anita Dobson plays the frail but fiercely independent Cynthia, who, after collapsing at a funeral, is put into a retirement village by her daughter Amanda (Tracy-Ann Oberman). She hates it, naturally. Shackled within the controlling regime of Nina Wadia’s Heather, the oppressive caricature managing Cedar Wood, Cynthia decides to get kicked out. She looks at the list of rules – and breaks them one by one. No narcotics? Sure, Cyn will bake some brownies with a secret ingredient. No antisocial behaviour? Pff, Cyn will flash her fellow OAPs in a game of strip bridge. No exotic animals? Of course, Cyn will release a Gaboon viper in the common room. Further complicating things is the presence of Frank (Nigel Havers), a Seventies pop star with whom she had a dalliance half a century ago.

It’s their dynamic that proves most successful. “In all the retirement villages in the world, she walks into mine,” Frank tells Cyn, who’s impervious at first to his charms. Later, in a moment of sweet catharsis, their true feelings now apparent, Cyn says Frank has “more sex appeal in your good arm than any Gen-Z boyband”. On the drawing board, the script no doubt sounded topical, fizzing with hilarity; alas, in execution, it requires the cast to do too much heavy lifting – even if there is a pleasing melancholy suffusing the production. As Cyn, Dobson is clearly having a ball, threading her performance with skeins of impish humour and mournful sentiment. There’s also an amusing scene in which Frank and his rival for Cyn’s affections slap it out, septuagenarian style, to the strains of Strauss’s “The Blue Danube”.

But for a strand that was renowned for tackling thorny societal issues, it’s surprising that it has made its comeback with something this lightweight. If it was hoping to be the new Abigail’s Party, it isn’t. Play for Today has been long-missed and excites considerable nostalgia for a more risk-taking age of single dramas on TV, yet one would imagine that the new series would at all costs aim to avoid appearing dated. It fails. This feels like Play for Yesterday, and that’s a problem.