F.r.i.e.n.d.s?
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
It is twenty years since friends started. Fafanapoli, right? I, like most people swimming around the chino and shirt-dressed sharks of their thirties (please, don’t take me!), have a ridiculous amount of affection for the show. Given the its title, it is either appropriate or ironic that so many people can recount so many words and stories of imaginary, made-up folk; probably more so than they could with any of their actual friends.
In this respect, Joey, Chandler, Ross, Rachel, Monica and Phoebe have a lot to answer for. In our youth, those six mid-twenty-somethings lived a fantastically rich social life, packed full of bountiful relationships, right up to their mid-thirties. Not only did they see their friends all-the-freaking-time, they somehow managed – despite being in one of the most densely populated and expensive cities in the world – to live, at best, across a corridor from each other, or at worst a couple of blocks away; but still within viewing distance of any sexual congress that might be happening in either apartment. Add to this their elegant ratio of three typically single men to three typically single women and they had a real nice balance of company. Even when two of the sextuplet paired off within the group, be it Ross and Rachel or Chan and Mon, the group survived relatively unscathed. What the!? Come on guys. Obviously, every episode was only 20-odd minutes long and it’s a sitcom, so really, it was just a snippet of their (ok, yes, imaginary) lives. For example, we didn’t see the times where Ross trundled to work, typed an article, went home and sobbed gently as he made microwave pasta for one…or when Joey was sitting in the waiting room of the STD clinic, sobbing gently before he got checked because of his quite obvious sex addiction; Rachel going into a hairdressers and asking for “a Rachel”, but sobbing into each lock of falling hair when she realised how tragically subversive and ironic this all was; or even when Phoebe tried to steal the babies she carried for her brother (whaaaaaaaa?!) and when the legal battle for custody became a “Real Life Story” on page 17 of Take a Break magazine…And, of course, we see her gently sobbing and soggying the oh so glossy pages.
Fundamentally, I appreciate that none of it was real - really, I do. Nevertheless and keeping in mind that I know it was all made up, I am now wondering if there may be some truth in the assertion that F.r.i.e.n.d.s, with all its colourful letters and unnecessary dots (it doesn’t stand for anything!!) has had an undeniably poignant influence on the en-rapt and aspiring minds of the nineties; as a type of subtle, undeliberate social propaganda. After all, our Digilogue X© senses were so bombarded with it for the best part of 10 formative years, and reinforced extensively beyond by endless repeats; to the boundless extent that that you would be hard pressed to find someone between 25 and 35 anywhere across the globe for whom the words “we were on a break” means nothing.
With such a reach, I cannot help but think that the creators of the show accidentally, but whimsically played with the subconscious expectations of their youthful viewers and gave us strange and unattainable aspirations for adulthood. Perhaps as a result of these six characters’ disingenuous and phoney behaviour (all enticingly dressed up with witty, memorable quips and seemingly always profoundly chilled nipples), we – the Digilogue X© generation arrived in our mid-twenties expecting a hilarious caffeine-fuelled decade of good times and scintillating anecdotes. Sadly, little of this came true.
My own pursuit of the life of my “friends” (pah!) has left me disenchanted. In reality, aged circa the circus of 30, living in a huge city, my friends live blinking miles away, taking an hour to get to on the tube, and 3 hours to get back from on the night bus. Everyone moves to London then moves away quicker than the novelty that brought them here, and “how you doin’?” just doesn’t elicit any kind of positive response from anyone – not even Americans! (Ok, a little from Americans, ref. the trip to London episode). As It turns out, I don’t know many masseuses, chefs, palaeontologists, actors or people that work at Ralph Lauren (what was Ralph Lauren again?!) – It seems to be mainly lawyers, bankers and accountants who, while often excellent people, just ain’t going to wake up in the display cabinet of a museum having spent a night attempting to expand our gene pool. Even when I try to place it in our lives now, just the simple idea of Joey having Tinder makes me weep liquid fire. Taken as he was then, the speed of the new scene would put him wall-to-flaming-wall with women, simply leaving little time to cover any of the other characters on the show.
Also, coffee is also pretty expensive, and I’m broadly sure that tossing it down my chute at the rate they did would leave me penniless. It’s also a major laxative so…you know…
Anyway, putting the situation of the sitcom to one side (and that they drank far more caffeine than booze – COME ON GUYS!) the other possibility is that the comedy of the show did a marvellous job of reflecting our Digilogue X© generation’s aspirations. I increasingly appreciate how so many of the incidents in Friends have ended up being reference-able. A new mother claims that her daughter has said her first word? I can’t help but suggest it actually sounds like she probably said “gleeba” (arf arf). Out for dinner and attempting to snaffle chips? The person opposite will inevitably hail “Joey doesn’t share food!”. Christmas dinner? “More turkey Mr Chandler?”, obviously. A shared, knowing smirk generally follows and a further exchange of quotations nostalgically recalls the number of occasions that we have each watched those episodes over the past 20 years and laughed every time. OK, yes, in one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world there were not really any Black, East Asian, Hispanic or Indian Sub-continental characters in it at all, or even anyone from the Antarctic, save for the odd Dr “Kidney Stones” or attractive “Charlie” academic, but no matter your race, to some degree when you’re bouncing over the waves of life on a late-twenties-early-thirties banana-boat, Friends always seems to offers an reference point for some light relief.
So is Friends the real life or is it just fantasy? Did it influence a half-generation into an unattainable life or does it simply give us, the Digiiogue X© generation (I am literally coining this – blog to follow), a convenient quote when we run out of our own quips? Or dare I say (scoff, scoff), was it just a gently-amusing, light-hearted, tee-hee-hee comedy that has no particular meaning or responsibility for anything of the way we Digilogue Xs© are now? Whichever way it is, it is brilliantly clear that no tv show, let alone a comedy, has ever or ever will be as contagiously effective as Friends was and continues to be. It is humorously carrying the baton from the groups of people huddled around the wireless listening to Churchill galvanising the war effort, or when newly declared teens first saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Somehow, it is an equally significant piece of communicative history as those important moments, with arguably a more expansive impact.
Thinking of today’s digital youth, with everything disposed at their fingertips, it is hard to see them collectively quoting anything much in 15 years’ time. Because of that, even if Friends was a little bit homogeneous or might have given a semi-generation a degree of false hope, I bemusedly believe that we, the Digilogue X© were lucky to have had it; and fortunate to be Digilogue X© enough to still get it now.