JENNY and I have just started watching the box set of 90s drama This Life.
For those too young, or too old, to remember it, the BBC series revolved around the lives of five young solicitors in a London flat.
The programme portrayed a lot of drinking, quite a bit of drug use and a fair amount of what I’ll call bed-hopping.
Back in the 1990s This Life’s swerving camera style and hip young actors made the series the talk of the town for a year or two.
But watching it now, in brand spanking new 2011, is a chastening experience. The show was first broadcast in 1996 when I was all of 17 years old – about seven years younger than the characters portrayed on screen.
In 2011, I’m now seven or eight years older than Anna, Egg, Miles, Warren and Milly.
It’s interesting too to note how the world has changed since the first series of This Life was aired in 1996.
What a very different time it was, during the last dying days of John Major’s Tory government.
The first episode of This Life includes such bizarre sights from this pre-Blair era as Anna and Miles smoking in a pub, Milly using a payphone and Egg reading a broadsheet copy of the Independent.
Is it too late to rename the series That Life?
