My phone is fixed! Thank the little baby Jesus, it’s a Christmas miracle!!

(Or an early Christmas present from my partner).

It turns out I remembered last week’s episode pretty well after all! With three exceptions I want to briefly mention:

1. Phoebe’s first gig at Central Perk being sadly cut short by the power cut.
2. Phoebe not knowing her own phone number. My partner has this exact problem so she gains the honour of being Phoebe Number 3. Which surprisingly makes Phoebe the character whose traits have appeared most in my Real Live Friends so far.
3. Joey telling Ross he’s in the friend-zone. A slightly nebulous concept, nowadays mired in gender-political problems associated with “nice guys who always finish last”. These “nice guys” often prove exactly how nice they are - by being annoyed their friend’s wont sleep with them. Friends™ conforms to the trope as Ross is beaten to the punch by newcomer Paulo (boo!).

“The One Where People Get Hurt”

Well, who would have thought a light-hearted sit-com like Friends™ would feature the heady topic of death before my life?

In this stand-out episode, we get a rather unexpected meditation on the passage of time and cyclical nature of life. It's beautifully expressed in the final scene where the Friends™ look through old baby pictures, but come across one of their recently deceased Nana’s – showing her and her friends hanging out at their very own coffee shop in bygone days.

We also see Ross having to go through his Nana's stuff. This took me back to my own grandfathers funeral (quite a few years ago now) where my floodgates finally burst open when I saw his empty glasses case in his room.

It’s not all sadness and a great job is done finding the humour in a dark situation. Including Joey matter-of-factually opining on the lack of life after death (which mirrors my partner’s sister’s lack of tact a few weeks ago.)

The writers also get a chance to flesh out the Gellar parents a bit more. It's mostly played for laughs with Gellar dad revealing he wants to be buried at sea and Gellar mum still having a go at Monica. However it keeps the sweetness of the rest of the episode when Gellar mum opens up to Monica over her own mother’s judgmental nature and they gain a better understanding of one another. I can’t help being reminded of my recent experience with my father. We all become our parents.

Thanks to the single nature of the Friends™ (as well as the fact there is no Christmas episode this season – see next week’s entry) we’ve yet to see any arguments about whose family to spend Christmas with. My partner and I have already done and dusted those, so this week brought her second favourite day of the year: “CHRISTMAS TREE DAY”.

She loves Christmas. To the extent that once, in a moment of drunken delirium, she asked “was it Santa or Jesus who died for our sins?”

Our halls are now fully bedecked with Holly after quite a traumatic experience for me. I had to a) spend time in the plasticised and disposable consumer hell that is Poundland™ and b) come to terms with the fact every year we kill millions of trees for little good reason.

But to say it was more traumatic for my partner would be a huge understatement!

Putting the decorations up is an important tradition for her and, as with most traditions, this comes with a large side of wine. Unfortunately the side of our kitchen top is not so wide, and one of the glasses fell and smashed. This meant a trip to A and E for me and my partner when she fell on one of the shards and got a large gash in her hand! The Friends™ aren’t the only ones spending time in a hospital this week.

We were shocked to find the hospital nearest to us is in special measures too. The large number of posters on the wall declaiming the service as “inadequate” didn't fill us with confidence. This, along with the poor timing of it being late at night on a Sunday, meant we had to hang around in the waiting room for over four and a half hours before we were seen!

And all the while we were haunted by the memory of our cats licking up the blood, and our new found knowledge that they would not hesitate to eat us should our boiler finally finish us off.

Apart from the poor waiting time, the staff were pleasant and helpful. Unlike the bullish nurse Ross encountered after the hockey game. We were kept amused by the appearance of two old and (presumably drunk) men on the ward, one of whom regaled us with Christmas songs. Thanks to him for lightening an otherwise awful experience. As our guardian angel I hope he didn’t have to wait too long to be seen!

Real Live Sitcom Moment:

My partner isn’t the only one in hospital this week, as Christmas decorations have successfully taken my boss out of action too.

Putting up an eight foot Christmas tree by himself proved more than he could handle. Doubly unfortunately he didn’t realise how hurt he was till he’d been lying down in his office for a few hours. Once he did he, eventually, worked up the courage to call me for help (uttering the phrase “I’ve been stuck here for longer than I’d care to admit...”).

This led to the, no doubt comical, sight of me struggling to lift him to a more upright position, which wouldn’t have been at all out of place in an episode of Friends™.

Strangely, this episode see’s Ross also hurting his back after he falls into a grave. I find this a worrying coincidence. (Made worse as I was listening to a Miranda Hart interview earlier where she talks about the comedic trope of someone falling into a grave.) Still, all these coincidences may be odd… But are they any odder than the Friends™ all wearing sunglasses to a funeral?

AND WE’RE BACK FOR ROUND TWO.

A NOTE ON TIMINGS: I’m aware at this point some of you might be thinking “that wasn’t two weeks...” I checked my calendar and it turns out you’re right! So what’s happened?

I’m going to be a little fluid with the timings to make certain episodes match up. However that’s not what’s happened here. As expected with such an ambitious project, I’ve created a bit of a backlog of life things and episodes which I’ve watched and made notes on but not written up yet. I didn’t expect to get behind quite so soon... But luckily for you readers it means the first few episodes will be out in quick succession before we settle into more regularly paced updates.

So I’m not cheating, I just wanted to make sure I thought the project had legs before I started writing things up all good and proper. As if to highlight my note on timings, this episode specifically states it is a month after the first rather than two weeks so please bear that in mind as we go forward.

Anyway, read on for:

“The One Where I’m Almost as Insensitive as Phoebe”

First up: some firsts!

Who’s that in the apartment across the street? It’s Ugly Naked Guy! Yes, second episode in and already we’ve seen our first Ugly Naked Guy joke. These were a mainstay of the first couple of series with vast amounts of jokes being made at our fat, ugly, disrobed friend’s expense. For obvious reasons I won’t be assigning one of my Real Live Friends as U.N.G. although I do have a fair few of them who aren’t shy when it comes to getting their kit off...

Secondly this episode features the first appearance of an African-American character in the form of Carol’s doctor. The show has been heavily criticised for its lack of prominent black characters over the years, so this is something I want to look at more as the series progresses.

Obviously it’s too soon to draw any conclusions but as a huge fan of Friends™ it was nice to see that the first black character was portrayed in a positive light and that no jokes were made at their expense. However, this portrayal of a high status black character is not particularly unusual by the early nineties (thanks to awesome shows such as Fresh Prince of Bel Air - with the wealthy Banks family father and mother being a lawyer and doctor respectively).

Finally, this episode gives us the first appearance of the Gellar parents. Much like U.N.G. (although they’re slightly more visible) these characters pop up quite a lot over the years. They often serve to bring in humorous plot points and flesh out the characters of Ross and Monica. They’re deployed to great effect to achieve this here; in a scene filled with strong jokes (including the first mention of Monica being fat as a youngster...).

The “pushy parent” is now an old cliché of comedy but it’s played with well in this scene. It’s helped by the strong performances of Elliott Gould and Christina Pickles, so credit should really go to those guys for making the characters such fan favourites! They're the only guest characters to appear in every season of the show (other than the women with the worlds most annoying voice and a certain blond haired barista).

The pushy parent cliché is one I’m familiar with in my life as I often find a legion of newspaper clippings concerning job opportunities thrust in my face whenever I return to my parents’ house...

I found it interesting that this scene focuses heavily on the pressure put on Monica by her mother to find a man. I can’t relate to this (due largely to me being a man...) but feel it demonstrates the show has a strong feminist thrust from the very start. This is also born out in the first scene of the episode, with the Friends™ frank discussion on the different sexual needs of men and women. As with many sitcom situations the pressure put on Monica by her mother is spun out in a slightly exaggerated fashion for comic effect – when the mother finds out about Ross and Carol's divorce she blames Monica for not telling her!

The way Friends™ deals with universal themes (such as the relationship between Monica and her mother) is surely the key to its longevity and enduring appeal in syndication. Lots of things in the world have changed since the nineties, but we’re already seeing how many things remain the same. Although I’m surprised to see that dungarees being in fashion is one of them.
 
Real Life Sitcom Moment of the Week:

My Real Live Friends and I dived into a new area of London this week in our continuing search for a new local. And were all saddened to find out  two of our number have decided to go on a break...

I say saddened. I was obviously elated. I mean what are the chances? One of the most famous story lines from the show playing out in my own life, and I’m only on the second episode! I suppose I could have hid it better than immediately saying how great it would be for the blog over my lamb schwarma...

So with that in mind I am making myself Phoebe Number 1 with my own insensitivity nearly matching her exclamation, to the newly divorced Ross, of “Carol is so great, I miss her.”