big brother was the hit not only of summer television, but of summer itself, because it told us, once and for all, that other people are a lot like us (or that we are a lot like them). In particular, it proved that being a member of a group is exactly what we knew all along-banal and irritating in a way it's hard to put your finger on. The dwindling band of Big Brother housemates occupied themselves with activities reminiscent of a dreary family Christmas. There were listless party games, episodic flare-ups-but mostly just a lot of sitting around trying to be nice to people whom you would never choose to be with.
Big Brother was compulsive viewing the first time around, but it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to watch a second time. There are enough difficult group dynamics in real life already, without going to the television for more. The housemates' interactions turned out to be ragged, opaque, and without any kind of closure (chucking people out might seem like a full stop, but it actually only serves to re-heat the drama).
But there are other kinds of groups on television which many of us love to go on watching: the fictional groups, the fantasy groups, the groups which we ache to be part of because they offer an experience so at odds with our own. Cold Feet, Frasier, This Life and a host of copycat dramas and comedies give glimpses of how life might be if only we could find the right gang of friends. Ever since the American novelist Armistead Maupin declared that friends are the new family we have been looking for good people to hang out with. Maupin was drawing on his own experience of gay San Francisco in the 1970s, but the pattern plays everywhere now. Middle-class men and women live far away from home towns and parents. They practice serial monogamy (including the gaps in between) until well into middle age, and depend on friends the way they once used their siblings and even cousins.
Where once a 35-year-old man or woman needed a spouse in order to have any kind of life, these days they are just as likely to rely on their group of similarly unanchored people. That, at any rate, is the theory and played out on television it looks lovely. The appeal of the ageing kids from Friends is that they are constantly available for one another. The whole arrangement-the flat-sharing in Greenwich Village, the daily meet in the Central Perk caf?-is entirely voluntary. Pretty, funny and kind, these people have other options. They could be meeting different friends and lovers, but the nice thing is they choose to be with each other-they choose to be with you.
Frasier does the same thing for an older, less cocksure generation. Its main characters are a pair of brothers, fortyish and divorced. Unable to form relationships, they make up their posse from the flotsam and jetsam which washes round their barely-functioning lives. In real life, this odd assortment of middle-aged people would be sitting alone at home, watching television. But in Frasier, they rally round with wit, kindness and simple physical presence to help each other endure the anomie of city life.
Britain has tried the format, too. This summer we had Hearts and Bones, Metropolis and Coupling all starting within a fortnight of each other, all predicated on the notion that sociable, attractive people in their late twenties and thirties spend all their free time with the same five other people. And not just any old people, but specifically the friends whom they've known since they were 18. The rival gangs of Metropolis (ITV) and Hearts and Bones (BBC1) met their mates at university and moved to London. Notwithstanding the fact that some of them are now successful (scoop-breaking financial journalist, New Labour hackette), and others are not (butcher, dope-smoking slacker) they love nothing more than to pile into each others' kitchens to chew the fat over the funny old business of being friends.
In fact, real groups of friends are always notional, unstable and on the point of changing into something else. Someone gets married, or a favourite wine bar closes down, and the dynamic is gone. Some people drift away, others edge in, and new constellations form. There are always people on the edge who never become more than friends of friends and never get round to writing down your telephone number. Television groups, by contrast, have an enduring shape because everyone knows everyone else equally well and the criss-cross alliances provide a rigid internal scaffolding.
In television groups, every member shares a history with everyone else, and usually a sexual one. A woman in Hearts and Bones was married to one man, preferred his brother, and was having an affair with her boss. In Coupling the alliances were so tangled that everyone appeared to have slept with everyone else already, even before the action had begun. In real life, by contrast, people bumble along for years without seeing their friends naked-and, frankly, without much wanting to. Occasionally someone might develop a crush on an old friend, but it usually fizzles out because they can remember just how ridiculous the other looked during their Spandau Ballet phase. And if someone did happen to take an ill-advised plunge into an affair with a fellow group member, you can be sure that, when it ends, they sensibly decide never to see each other again. In television dramas, on the other hand, ex-lovers perversely decide to stick around each other, and play out every tantalising variation on splitting up.
If you thought your own social life should look like one of these ensemble pieces, you would be setting yourself up for cruel disappointment. I once had a boyfriend who could not get over the niggling belief that his life should resemble This Life, the Amy Jenkins drama which centred on a gang of house-sharing friends in their late twenties. Pushing 40, he lived in a big house and rented out rooms to friends, some of whom he had met-just as in Metropolis-at Leeds University. But the tenants/friends showed a wilful tendency not to play the parts which had been ascribed to them in this particular production. Instead of creating the delicious sexual tension on which This Life depended, they made calm, happy friends. The upshot was that my boyfriend was left watching Friends on television every Friday night and brooding over why the gang wasn't there. His worst fear, which very likely came true, was that they had all snuck off and started a new group without him. n
