Irish Examiner view: Troubling trends in the land of giants
![Irish Examiner view: Troubling trends in the land of giants Irish Examiner view: Troubling trends in the land of giants](/cms_media/module_img/7646/3823429_2_articlesmall_2.74354792.jpg.jpg)
South Africa's Siya Kolisi lifts the Webb Ellis Cup with team-mates following victory in the Rugby World Cup 2023 final at the Stade de France in Paris.
Covetous eyes are also being cast over the audiences for the sport and it is important that blue riband events remain free to air. Changes to usher in a new world league competition which is due to start from 2026 envisage a grand final between the top team from the northern hemisphere and the southern champions.
While the wind of change is blowing, that is not always to the good. Rugby must proceed with care.
For a period of our lives, the US sitcom Friends and its ensemble cast were one of those shared experiences that fall under the heading of ‘appointment TV’. As with Neighbours, Happy Days, or EastEnders, we could settle down for cross-cultural escapism. And we did so in very large numbers. At its height, its stars were earning $1m per episode.
Friends proposed to deal with some of the absurdities of centennial life and its secret was in choosing as its main characters six singletons with whom audience segments could identify, some of them romantically: Naïve and wealthy Rachel; uptight Monica; ditzy and insightful Phoebe; good-hearted geek Ross; and the swaggering and struggling actor Joey.
Matthew Perry, who died this weekend after apparently drowning in his hot tub in the famous Los Angeles celebrity millionaire district of Pacific Palisades , was the most intense and most realistically portrayed member of the gang, who lived above the fictional Central Perk coffee shop in New York’s Greenwich Village for 236 episodes between 1994 and 2004. The series was filmed in Burbank, California, although some location shots took place in Manhattan.
Perry’s character, Chandler Bing, was an insecure and laconic statistician and data processor, whose self-doubt echoed Perry’s. These led him to pre-emptively ditch his ideal woman, Julia Roberts, because he feared she would leave him. The scriptwriters had Chandler marry Courtney Cox’s obsessive-compulsive Monica. The fictional couple adopt twins delivered by a surrogate at the end of the series.
The original programme pitch said it was “about sex, love, relationships, careers, a time in your life when everything’s possible”. With Perry, the youngest of the group, there was a melancholy around some of his performances. He had significant alcohol-related issues and a troubling dependence on Vicodin painkillers, which he took to offset the consequences of a jet-ski accident. Subsequent spells of rehab led him to speak openly and vigorously about his addiction. “You can’t have a drug problem for 30 years and then expect to have it solved in 28 days,” he said.
Perry, whose biography was called Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, recounted how he was taking 55 Vicodin pills per day. He had attended 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and undergone stomach surgery on 16 occasions. Fourteen triple vodkas were no longer enough to get him drunk, he observed, and that knowledge provided impetus to his quest for sobriety.
In the poignant, but highly catchy, theme music to the show, the Rembrandts sing “your job’s a joke, you’re broke, you love life’s DOA” before breaking into the chorus, “but I’ll be there for you”, Sadly, it appears that one of the biggest TV stars of this generation had no one there for him in the final moments of a farewell that might have been scripted in Hollywood.