A chat with some friends

This is a story about a group of twentysomethings who live together in the big city. There's David, Marta and Seth. Then there is David's roommate Michael who winds up marrying Marta who ends up working with David.

The action begins in Massachusetts in the early 1980s where David, Marta and Seth, all former theatre students, are three writers in search of an idea. They hit upon something based around the perils of looking for love through the personal columns of newspapers. After numerous rewrites, their comedy musical called Personals reaches New York. Among those who sees the off-Broadway production is their agent who convinces David and Marta they should come up with ideas for TV shows.

The story moves to the present day. David Crane and Marta Kauffman are in Los Angeles talking about the revival of Personals, which opens in London this week. The reason they're not in London themselves and are talking via a conference call is that the move into television proved to be something of a success.

Friends - the show they created - starts its seventh season this autumn; since its debut in 1994 it has been nominated for 14 Emmys and draws an average of 25 million viewers each week in America. It earns NBC around $1 billion a year in syndication rights, making the stars' recent pay hike to $750,000 per episode seem like a positive bargain.

Kauffman and Crane have spent so much time together that talking to them is like conversing with a pair of twins, so seamlessly do their sentences and thoughts flow from one to another.

They both started out in musical theatre and assumed that was what they would be doing for the rest of their lives. The idea for Personals came when, as students, the pair saw personal ads as a phenomenon full of comedic potential. "When we first started working on it back in 1980," Kauffman recalls, "it was just going to be a song, then we realised how rich the subject area was so it became a revue." Crane continues: "Between 1981 and 1984 we changed it hugely, rewriting some and adding new material." The final version features a score by the Oscar-winning composers Alan Menken and Schwartz as well as Kauffman's husband

Michael Skloff. Having grown up with Sondheim and Fosse musicals, the pair thought that drama was their vocation. "Although we both grew up watching television," explains Crane, "it didn't seem like something you could actually do; television was something you turned on, rather than made."

That all changed when their agent suggested they try coming up with ideas for television shows. After a couple of misfires they found success with the controversial Dream On in the late 1980s which gave them the first chance to run their own show.

But it was Friends that proved to be their most inspired creation. The show - now six years old - has made household names of its stars, made millions for the hairdressing industry and spawned a new species of anorak who knows the lines to every single show. In a world whose dreams are increasingly American, dreams this sharply written became the aspirational template for urban twentysomethings the world over. Its fingerprints are evident on British shows from This Life to Cold Feet to Coupling.

"What I find remarkable," notes Kauffman, "is how intensely people get into the characters' lives and how much they care about the relationships. I love it when people beg me to tell them what's going to happen next. It's as if they believe these people really exist."