A fortnight ago, the Office for National Statistics told us that Clapham Common had become the first area in the UK where average household incomes have topped £100,000 a year. That’s a lot of stripy shirts with the collar turned up, eh? But it may also, in a funny sort of way, be the greatest legacy of Matthew Perry, star of Friends, who died at the weekend at the horribly young age of 54.
For many, including me, Chandler Bing was the funniest friend in Friends. He was also, though, probably the richest friend in Friends. What exactly was his job? Nobody knew. “It’s, um ... it has something to do with transponding?” hazarded Monica, once. Or, as Chandler put it himself, leaving the kitchen in his tie, “All right kids, I’ve got to get to work! If I don’t input those numbers ... doesn’t make much of a difference.”
Whatever it was, he was a professional. Ross, as a palaeontologist, was one too, but I doubt he was raking it in, even in an American university. Rachel would become a fashion executive, although she started off as a waitress, alongside Joey’s actor, Monica’s chef and Phoebe’s masseuse. Right from the start, though, Chandler had an office — to himself — and a salary, most of which he appeared to spend on sleeveless cardigans. He could have lived alone. He didn’t.
In Clapham today, average household income is so high because one in eight of all adults there are young professionals under 34. Two thirds of them, says the ONS, rent in houseshares. And, while the Friends did not technically all share a house, young, communal living was very much the vibe. This was also, at least as much as the jokes, a big reason the show was a hit. They were close, they were hot, they had endless sex, you badly wanted their lives.
Over here, not long afterwards, This Life realised you could sell the same dream while losing the jokes altogether. Look back now, and it’s moderately hard to explain the appeal. They were young, they had great jobs, they lived together and ... so what? But it was captivating. It was aspirational. It was a social revolution.
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I appreciate how irritating it is when a particular generation claims to have first done something that has been happening for ever, so I’m loath to suggest that mine invented “moving to the city and having a flatmate”. To an earlier age group, though — think of The Young Ones (1982) — it was students who lived communally, before growing out of it, and gladly so. A young professional would have had their own flat, as per Bridget Jones, covertly a half-generation older, or been deemed a failure. Rising property prices played a role in changing that, but so did changing aspiration. You could live alone, or you could live with Jennifer Aniston and Matt LeBlanc. No contest. Why hadn’t everybody wanted to do this for ever?
Personally, I came of professional age with the house-sharing boom. Not in Clapham, as it happens, but just up the road. With our combined incomes, none of which were huge, we were still rampant and somewhat hypocritical agents of gentrification and change. There I was, in a house built for a young Brixton family, living instead with a trainee barrister, an autocue operator and a producer for MTV. Where did the families go? God knows. Like baby pigeons, they were theoretical entities, nowhere to be seen. I was there for three years. Almost day by day, you could watch the old Caribbean Brixton getting squeezed out by the money brought in via the likes of me. “It’s so sad,” we’d tell each other, perhaps over sushi.
When Chandler and Monica finally marry, they’re both probably in their early thirties. By today’s UK averages — 36 for women, 38 for men — that’s actually quite young. Ross married younger, true, but also terribly often, so I’m not sure that counts. With rising costs even since then, those rich house-sharers of Clapham will eventually be faced with exactly their choice; stay put and defer traditional adult life yet further, or move to the suburbs? Both involve a sacrifice. You might promise Joey he can always visit but, come on, will he?
The later they go, or the fewer that do, the more the change is embedded. The more millennials talk whimsically about “adulting” as a distant dream, the more cities change, the less support family-focused polices have, the older people become when they first ponder voting Conservative, the more socially liberal we become. Some shifts are welcome, some less so. All are profound.
These days, fewer young people can afford to leave home in the first place. Those who do will have a harder time. Only a decade later, the great Peep Show (2006) showed us the dream going wrong, with grim homes in grim areas, and friends you can’t shake off, who bring you down rather than lifting you up. In Crashing (2016), her pre-Fleabag sitcom, Phoebe Waller-Bridge could recreate the old dynamic only by housing her bohemian sharers in a disused hospital. When Generation Z watch Friends today, I suppose it must be still aspirational, too, but in a much more distant way. Perhaps like my lot aspiring to the life of Don Draper in Mad Men.
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This is all, I know, heavy stuff to hang on the door — not next to the picture frame; that was the other door — of a sitcom character who once owned a chicken and a duck. No matter, because Chandler truly was a pioneer of a new way of living. They all were. If nothing else, just remember the song — “so no one told me life was going to be this way” — which made the most remarkable, and subsequently unrelatable point of all, which was that this glorious, glossy, frictionless life was actually supposed to represent a failure. And that, looking back, may have been the best joke of all.
