{"id":490242,"date":"2026-03-23T02:46:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T02:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/490242\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T02:46:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T02:46:09","slug":"this-life-is-30-it-embodied-the-chaos-of-being-young-in-the-1990s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/490242\/","title":{"rendered":"This Life is 30! It embodied the chaos of being young in the 1990s"},"content":{"rendered":"

My former housemate Tilly sent me a message last week: \u201cThis Life is Back! 30-year anniversary!\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019d line up on our Habitat sofa to watch it with the home phone switched to \u201ccall minder\u201d so we wouldn\u2019t be disturbed. Imagine.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

And it taught us some valuable life lessons. Central to the story was Anna\u2019s 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\u2019s plodding five-year relationship, in which they were clearly both bored. Milly\u2019s affair with her creepy married solicitor boss O\u2019Donnell didn\u2019t exactly teach us about office predators \u2014 in the Nineties these were run of the mill, and one even made it over our house threshold for a few ill-advised months \u2014 but it warned us that if you settle down too early you\u2019ll probably end up having an affair.<\/p>\n

Another thing This Life taught us was that however many vodkas you\u2019d downed the night before, or whose bed you ended up in, or whether you\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

\"CastDaniela Nardini, Amita Dhiri, Andrew Lincoln, Jack Davenport and Raymond Tikaram in This LifeBBC<\/p>\n

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\u2019s confrontations and confessions took place, with Egg chopping vegetables in the background. At our kitchen table \u2014 an extravagance from a pine shop in Chiswick \u2014 no bad day or drama couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s Gen Zers? I couldn\u2019t say but, like the characters in This Life, one thing we never were was lonely.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a38,000 to \u00a335,000, ever live in a big terraced house today? We paid \u00a3100 a week each.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cno one should take other people\u2019s food from the fridge without asking\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n

A rule we did share with the This Life house was \u201cno moving in unwanted partners\u201d. Potential boyfriends were scrutinised closely over breakfast as if by an employment tribunal and were often given short shrift with a \u201cyou deserve better\u201d the moment our front door closed on them.<\/p>\n

A few men certainly ran from us too. I\u2019ll 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\u2019d 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\u2019d had a lasting crush on at university, Jemima and I decided to invite them round for a flirty supper. <\/p>\n

By unfortunate coincidence all the girls were in that evening and weren\u2019t 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\u2019d 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\u2019t remember that evening.)<\/p>\n

\"BridgetBridget Harrison todayCHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n

Unusually, given the statistics, all five of us former housemates are married now and \u2014 so far \u2014 have escaped divorce. For this I\u2019d personally like to thank This Life\u2019s 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\u2019t feel the need to rush into romantic domesticity because we had each other.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cprofession\u201d. When Egg gave up his law career to work in a caf\u00e9\u00a0and 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\u2019s depiction of the ever varied life of law.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And not coincidentally Jemima and I now live next door to each other. Having her there still makes any drama \u2014 these days more likely to be with an errant teenager than an unsuitable suitor \u2014 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\u2019s a comforting thought. Meanwhile, last night her 18-year-old son jumped over the fence to hang out with mine. We\u2019ve come full circle.<\/p>\n

So this week we are getting together on my sofa to watch This Life. We\u2019ll drag in as many of our kids as we can and confiscate their phones. They might just learn something.<\/p>\n

This Life is now available on BBC iPlayer<\/p>\n

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