Humdinger of a farewell

10 glorious years for Joey, Phoebe, Rachel, Ross, Chandler and Monica

11 April 2012

I am in tears and can hardly breathe between the sobs. I feel distraught and cheated, bereft and alone, as though I've just been dumped by the most handsome millionaire on Earth. I have just finished watching the last ever episode of Friends. Life, I'm quite sure, will never be the same again.

I didn't feel like this at the end of Sex and the City or thirtysomething, not even at the demise of Moonlighting (and that was when Bruce Willis sported a full head of hair).

How have I become so emotionally dependent on a cheesy American sitcom set betwixt a coffee shop and a ludicrously spacious Manhattan apartment? I watched the first episode of Friends - the one where Rachel, sporting a shag hairstyle that launched a million doppelgangers, turns up in her bridal gown on Monica's doorstep - in September 1994. I was immediately hooked.

That programme might have received lukewarm reviews - "No characters, just clichés" was about the sum of them - but I never missed an episode.

I rushed home from even quite promising dates to catch it; I would collect the videos and later the DVDs, and watch endless reruns until I knew the one-liners off by heart (the formula was one laugh every 30 seconds).

Friends was there for me on lonely Saturday mornings while I sat in bed wearing a face pack pondering two days without speaking to a soul, and there at the end of a very long night out when I hadn't met anyone/been bored out of my skull/been forced to pay the bill.

I spent the first eight years of its run as a single woman: this was the very first programme to reflect who I was. Long before Bridget Jones, it had six singletons as its heroes, and they weren't sad, desperate or unattractive. They were all goodlooking, and funny, and they never ate ready meals.

Being with each other was more important than being with family, or in a relationship. And they never seemed to go to work. To me, it was as close to paradise as the human imagination can, well, imagine.

The women characters weren't icons - they were women who were unintimidating and had feet of clay. Phoebe was the flaky fruitcake who loved alternative therapy and cats (even smelly ones); Monica was a repressed busybody who was a childhood fatty, while Rachel was the best friend every woman has never had. I loved Rachel: she was beautiful, vulnerable, unlucky in love, and addicted to fashion.

Over the years, Friends dealt, rather tentatively, with issues - infertility, homosexuality, compulsive eating (that was Joey, obviously) - but that wasn't the point.

Watching Friends always made me feel safe. That mauve apartment was simply the most incredibly cosy place to be. The only indication that 9/11 had taken place was that the Twin Towers were seamlessly erased from the New York skyline in the opening credits.

It would have been unthinkable for Phoebe to get breast cancer, for example, like Sex and the City's Samantha, or for the Pantene-haired Rachel to plumb the depths of loneliness and selfdoubt that Carrie was able to do. And, yes, sometimes that meant Friends was glib and superficial but that is often what you need telly to be. It was one big chocolate eclair for the soul.

There were wonderful moments, like Rachel's first kiss with Ross in the doorway of the coffee shop. Or when he says her name at his wedding to another woman. Best of all was watching the hyperchubby Monica dancing at a party in Ross's college dorm.

But there were klunkers, too, usually when real-life celebrities turned up in bit parts - George Clooney and Brad Pitt spring to mind - because they destroyed my fantasy that these six people really were my bosom buddies.

I grew up with Friends, but I never outgrew it. Not that the characters ever looked remotely older, of course (Jennifer Aniston dropped 20 pounds over the course of the decade, and became transformed from a rather dumpy, black-stockinged puppy into a svelte, polished best-inshow), but they did evolve.
They had to. Phoebe got married, Monica and Chandler adopted a baby, Rachel discovered a career and became a rather improbable and absentee mother.

Those plotlines, however, meant its magic started to fade. People in couples are so much more boring than singletons.

They get mortgages, and have to buy prams instead of giant lattes. Perhaps that is why I, and millions of other women (fans of the show are mostly female; my husband can't stomach it) feel so sad at its passing. We're now officially past it.

I, too, got married, and have started to enjoy more practical programming like Small Town Gardens and A Place in the Sun. Very soon I expect to be listening to The Archers and despairing over its racy plotlines.

So, did the final episode live up to its billing? Without wanting to spoil this evening for those of you without a review tape or a loft in Greenwich Village (this episode was screened in America three weeks ago, to widespread hysteria), I can only say there is a spine-tingling, stomach churning, humdinger of a kiss and a really happy ending. If only life was like that.

Friends is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.

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Humdinger of a farewell

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