Sun, sea and sadness on BBC

There's sun, sea and sadness in BBC One's new daytime soap opera filmed Down Under but Out of the Blue has a very British feel, says Tim Teeman...

Battered by more than 20 years of 16-year-olds pashing and squabbling, and tear-aways becoming responsible citizens of Ramsay Street and Summer Bay, it is very strange to watch the first five episodes of a new Australian soap opera that doesn't - at this early stage anyway - have a teenage focus. Odder still is that the BBC has commissioned Out of the Blue to be made in Australia. The logic, and financial sense, of this escapes me - couldn't they just make a new British soap? - but, hey, everyone runs around on the beach in skimpy clothing and it looks pretty.

A BBC spokesman says: “The majority of drama shown across the BBC is UK produced. The BBC commissioned this new production to offer audiences a different flavour and perspective which complements existing UK series such as Doctors.”

The daily drama follows a group of former school-friends, now in their early thirties, reunited in the Sydney beach suburb of Manly after nine years and immediately enmeshed in a web of secrets, lies and murder. The characters remind one of The Secret Life of Us, the Australian This Life that was bounced mercilessly round the schedules of Channel 4 a few years ago, with dashes of Friends and Friends Reunited. You can tell its genesis is British because very soon all the bright, shiny characters are weeping, regretting and grieving. It's EastEnders-on-Sea, with a catchy theme tune and colourful credits. It's compulsive in a watch-the-pretty-people-suffer kind of a way - classy, fast and slick.

Gabby, the Little Ms Perky who gets all the friends back together, is having a covert affair with Paul, the teenage son of her friend Jared. Jared is married to Tracy, who has terrible split ends. They have a lovely young daughter, Zoe, and are trying, unsuccessfully, to have another child. Gabby's voiceover hooks us with the dark promise: “In less than 48 hours, one of us would be dead and someone close to us, maybe even one of us, would be the killer.” And yes, by episode three, one of the group is dead. A whodunnit takes shape.

The reunion brings back Beck, Jared's true love, who broke his heart when she went to Melbourne to be a doctor. We know Beck is something of a siren because she has dusky hair and wears a ridiculous designer tulip dress to the reunion beach barbecue. Oh, and she has an older, married lover (with a beard, always a bad sign in a soap - bearded men are NEVER TO BE TRUSTED) who has followed her from Melbourne. Tracy is threatened by Beck. Beck and Jared still have the old electricity. Poppy is the Phoebe-from-Friends character - dotty and armed with a guitar, which she uses as an accompaniment to her absurd songs.

Another of the group, Philby, has been living in London and brings his heavily pregnant wife Tess over for the reunion. Philby has a fantastic- ally dreadful mother, who is clearly a hardened Mafioso. As soon as he and Tess knock on her door, you're shouting “Get out of there”. She clasps her son far too hard and thanks Tess menacingly for bringing Philby, “and my first grandson”, home. She is by far the best character. Philby has an evil, utterly sexalicious brother, crimes yet unknown. “Stava” (Ian) is the handsome stud whom everyone likes, but his brother Addy (an honorary member of the reunion group) is a sweet guy mixed up with gangsters.

This is all very grown-up, but Aussie soap connoisseurs will remember that, pre-Neighbours, daytime dramas were adult-led. My personal favourite, the unbeatable Sons and Daughters, was a complicated, melodramatic 972-episode colossus, each episode ending with that sepia frozen screen and plaintive theme (“Tears and sadness and happiness...”).

There are many portents of doom in Out of the Blue: Jared's first line to wife Tracy is a wistful desire “to live happily ever after”, which is obviously not going to happen. Philby, noting that his mother is a “monster”, says to Tess that “everything is going to work out perfectly”. Nahhh. Gabby's voiceover bangs on about things falling apart for the first time when they were 21. Was that when Beck left Jared, or the other biggie: the mysterious, presumed death, of Jason, who fell overboard from a ferry, never to be seen again?

Now, seeing as Jason features on all the ridiculous retrospective footage of the group from their schooldays (the adult actors dressed in school uniform), I would wager that he might not be as dead as everyone thinks. Recall dear Harold in Neighbours, swept out to sea and then returned from the dead, shrugging off the barnacles to run the coffee shop?

The BBC wants Out of the Blue to become a long-stay resident of the daytime schedule. Doctors gets 1.7 million viewers and to survive Out of the Blue will need to hover respectably above a million. The action will include high-speed boat chases and the murder mystery will be solved within three months and won't subsume everything: love triangles, business intrigue and the dark deeds of that marvellously evil Mafioso mum will bubble alongside it. It will be intriguing to see if it retains its focus on these smart, urbane thirtysomethings, or whether, in a year's time, it is transformed into just another suburban Aussie soap with stroppy teens. But first, let's prepare for Jason's miraculous return from his watery grave.

Out of the Blue starts on Monday, BBC One, 2.15pm