I mean COME ON! Who ever does stuff like this??

No, not my actual real friends, but those cretinous beautiful Manhattanites! E4 is finally putting us all out of our misery by finally decommissioning Friends. The giant wall of enamel, big hair and very dated 90s fashion, is finally being taken out to the paddock, and mercifully shot!

Could I BE any happier? Probably not!

But fear not, sick women of the world who watch it on loop, my happiness at this news lasted only 2 minutes, because Comedy Central have picked up the baton, so if you have Sky, you can still watch that MOR crap!

Now I remember when it launched. My sister and I watched it together on a Friday night, all the way back. I watched it, as a blossoming adult, because it had some pretty women in it. My sister watched it because she loved all comedy. But pretty quickly, after the first series, I got bored with it. It was catchphrase and idiom based. But it didn’t have the Father Ted anarchism, or the twisted logic of something like the Fast Show. It was too vanilla for me. I grew up watching the Mary Whitehouse Experience when I was 11, this to me, felt like a comedic regression. I had already started watching Seinfeld as I had a telly in my room, I couldn’t understand why people loved Friends so much and the BBC put Seinfeld on at 12.30 on a school night.

Little did I know that it would become such a cultural keystone. 3 years after it launched, I was to do my first stand up gig, and my comedic up-bringing felt so at odds with the world around me. A world of Rachel haircuts, and people being called such a Monica, as if that was a psychological grouping. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why people watch it. They know the characters intimately, their relationships etc, they don’t have to engage their brains, and occasionally gurgle at the funny man in the tank top saying something sarcastic AGAIN. Or maybe kooky Phoebe doing something zany and kooky. It is like the comedic equivalent of a mental enema I reckon.

I could never tell if any of them ever had a proper job. If these were metro-New Yorkers, living in amazing apartments, the closest any of them came to having a real job was Ross, who was a Palaeontologist…and even that is a blatantly comedic job. How could some jobbing actor pay for an upscale apartment?  It was based in reality apparently, but not a single part of it was real. They never, ever argued either. They never fell out. Sure they slept with one another, but you never had Ross call Joey a cock and not talk to him for a whole series. WHY? Oh, cause they were friends.

I don’t want to write another word about this show. I know what hell will be for me. It will be stuck in a room, with my friend Alex’s mum’s sofas from when he lived in Woodside Park (the world’s worst sofa), with a telly playing Friends on loop, whilst some annoying bloke sat next to me ruins every shitty punch line, occasionally spewing out phrases such as ‘could this BE any more hellish?’ I doubt it could to be honest.

I must be a good in this life, if for no other reason.

- Anand