My former housemate Tilly sent me a message last week: “This Life is Back! 30-year anniversary!” Staring out from my phone was a screen shot from BBC iPlayer of its characters: Anna with her arch smile, the twinkly-eyed deviant Miles, pudgy, tormented Warren, earnest Egg and sensible Milly (at least until the affair with her boss). The familiarity of their faces flooded me with nostalgia, like seeing a photograph of old friends.
When This Life, about a group of young lawyers flatsharing in Southwark, London, launched in 1996 (can it really be 30 years ago?) Tilly and I lived with three friends in a Victorian terraced house in Shepherds Bush. Anna, Miles, Warren, Egg and Milly weren’t just characters in a TV show to us, they were part of the fabric of our early adulthood, their lives, we felt, a mirror of our own. We even had the same sunshine yellow paint on our kitchen walls. Every Sunday night we’d line up on our Habitat sofa to watch it with the home phone switched to “call minder” so we wouldn’t be disturbed. Imagine.
TV newsletter
What to watch or stream, plus news and reviews from our small-screen experts.
Sign up with one click
Unlike cosy Friends, This Life depicted the twentysomething years realistically as raw and chaotic. Filmed with a jogging handheld camera (cutting edge at the time), it featured gruelling late nights at the office, get-togethers at pub tables that were covered with ash trays and pint glasses, ill-advised liaisons at home and at work. Miles had oral sex in a county court toilet. Anna had an abortion. It was also ahead of its time in depicting gay relationships side by side with heterosexual ones.
And it taught us some valuable life lessons. Central to the story was Anna’s on-off relationship with the foppish philandering Miles, and that instilled in us, early in our adult relationships, the thought to never waste time with a commitment-phobe. Then there was Milly and Egg’s plodding five-year relationship, in which they were clearly both bored. Milly’s affair with her creepy married solicitor boss O’Donnell didn’t exactly teach us about office predators — in the Nineties these were run of the mill, and one even made it over our house threshold for a few ill-advised months — but it warned us that if you settle down too early you’ll probably end up having an affair.
Another thing This Life taught us was that however many vodkas you’d downed the night before, or whose bed you ended up in, or whether you’d been sick on the night bus home, you always got up to go to work: cut to Anna slogging up the steps of Chancery Lane Tube station in miniskirt and heels, lighting a fag to get her through a hangover. No WFH/sofa days for us. We presented in the office Monday to Friday with no exceptions, bacon sandwich in hand if necessary. Even today the concept of bed rotting makes me feel quite queasy.
Daniela Nardini, Amita Dhiri, Andrew Lincoln, Jack Davenport and Raymond Tikaram in This LifeBBC
But then we also knew that however gruelling, boring or stressful your working day had been, there would be solace back with your housemates. The cluttered kitchen in This Life was where a day’s confrontations and confessions took place, with Egg chopping vegetables in the background. At our kitchen table — an extravagance from a pine shop in Chiswick — no bad day or drama couldn’t be soothed by fifty cups of tea. I am so grateful that we had no option to retreat into our rooms to stare at our phones or a laptop although I do wonder now what on earth we all did at home except natter and watch telly together. Every aspect of life we lived face to face, IRL. Were our friendships, forged without the time-suck and distraction of social media, deeper than those of today’s Gen Zers? I couldn’t say but, like the characters in This Life, one thing we never were was lonely.
And we were hugely lucky too. This was just after the recession of the early Nineties, when house prices fell even in London, so finding a place to live with the luxury of a communal kitchen and a sitting room was actually possible. How could five friends, with salaries that ranged from £8,000 to £35,000, ever live in a big terraced house today? We paid £100 a week each.
Despite our range of incomes we decided right at the start to ignore as utterly joyless another of the This Life house share rules that “no one should take other people’s food from the fridge without asking”. We all ate communally, the first home being the one to start cooking, and divided up shopping bills. This was not without some tension, especially as one housemate was prone to extravagances such as hunks of parmesan and growing herbs. But to this day I insist on family suppers and have sworn never to quibble over who paid what in a bill.
A rule we did share with the This Life house was “no moving in unwanted partners”. Potential boyfriends were scrutinised closely over breakfast as if by an employment tribunal and were often given short shrift with a “you deserve better” the moment our front door closed on them.
A few men certainly ran from us too. I’ll never forget one excruciating night after my room-mate Jemima had befriended a young author who was about to release what was to become a massive bestseller. We’d all devoured preview copies of the book and thought it brilliant, while his author picture was quite dishy. When we discovered he was a school friend of a guy I’d had a lasting crush on at university, Jemima and I decided to invite them round for a flirty supper.
By unfortunate coincidence all the girls were in that evening and weren’t going to let any men arriving at the house feel too big for their boots. Meanwhile, I was so nervous, I had downed a bottle of wine before they’d even arrived. These two earnest chaps unwittingly stepped into a Spanish Inquisition fuelled by booze and oestrogen. When conversation retreated to a painful debate about science versus religion I shelved any hope of romance with my uni crush. (It took another ten years before I managed to marry him; he claims he can’t remember that evening.)
Bridget Harrison todayCHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES
Unusually, given the statistics, all five of us former housemates are married now and — so far — have escaped divorce. For this I’d personally like to thank This Life’s final episode in which Miles heads to his wedding day full of dread and doubt post-shag with Anna. No thanks. We all left it quite late, most of us well into our thirties before we settled down. We didn’t feel the need to rush into romantic domesticity because we had each other.
Thanks to This Life we were also familiar with the idea that it was OK to jack in a job you hate, even if in a “profession”. When Egg gave up his law career to work in a café and try to make it as a writer, we all cheered. And it worked the other way round too. One housemate went on to become a top lawyer for the NHS, partly inspired by This Life’s depiction of the ever varied life of law.
Our career paths have all meandered, but we are all decidedly grown up now (a newspaper columnist, a national museum curator, a magazine editor, the lawyer and me). We have 13 children between us. The oldest is 24, almost the same age we were when we started living together. She calls me for dating advice and I think how lucky we were to be young before apps. If her experience is anything to go by, every man is a Miles now.
And not coincidentally Jemima and I now live next door to each other. Having her there still makes any drama — these days more likely to be with an errant teenager than an unsuitable suitor — all the easier to deal with. If either of us has a crisis we convene at her kitchen table, just as we once did in Shepherds Bush. If we make it 30 more years, it might just be me and her again, little old ladies together. Scary how soon that will come but it’s a comforting thought. Meanwhile, last night her 18-year-old son jumped over the fence to hang out with mine. We’ve come full circle.
So this week we are getting together on my sofa to watch This Life. We’ll drag in as many of our kids as we can and confiscate their phones. They might just learn something.
This Life is now available on BBC iPlayer
Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows, the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer, the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don’t forget to check our critics’ choices to watch and browse our comprehensive TV guide