Television - The end of a sitcom that did as much for hairstyles, coffee and comedy writing as friendship. By Andrew Billen Friends and How Friends Changed the World (Channel 4)

I would hate to submit to an audit, but I have a nasty suspicion that, in the seven years I have held down this job, the programme I have reviewed most often is not Panorama, nor Timewatch nor The South Bank Show, but Friends, whose tenth and final season in the UK concludes on 28 May (9pm). Never apologise, never explain and all that, but I cannot tell you how vindicated I felt to find scheduled on the same channel for 22 May a two-hour documentary called How Friends Changed the World.

I would have been even happier had Channel 4 shown it, which for "contractual reasons" it didn't. Having seen the preview tape, however, I can tell you that How Friends Changed the World spent at least a third of its time on how Friends had changed the fortunes of its cast. These changes were what you would expect - from Tampax ads and ketchup commercials to international stardom and famous husbands - although the fortunes, it was good to be reminded, were of a hitherto unheard-of order for an ensemble show. Wages per episode per Friend leapt from $100,000 to $1m (in the final series), the studio bowing to extortion when clever, academic Lisa Kudrow, who plays the dippy Phoebe, led the main cast of six in one-for-all and all-for-one negotiations. But good luck to them. The studio will make billions more in syndication sales.

As for changing the world, all concerned would probably settle for the documentary's claim that they reinvented youth culture. By 1994, youth, we were told, had run out of steam; and Friends somehow put the steam back in. I don't know about that, but I did write in my first column on the subject, in July 1997, that these six Manhattan twentysomethings were "not quite yuppies, not quite slackers" and, perhaps, their lifestyles suggested that during those boom years you could both work and have a life - a synthesis reflected in the women's clothes, which were neither designer nor grunge but stylishly individual, suitable for work or play.

What else did it change? Women's hairstyles, certainly, Rachel's Dougal-flop briefly becoming de rigueur. (A hairdresser enthused: "Rachel's hair almost had its own show.") It encouraged a shift in the location of street life from the pub to the coffee shop. In reaction to Cheers, the hit show that it succeeded, Friends spent a portion of every episode not in a bar, but on the sofa of the Central Perk coffee shop. In 1995, we learned, Britain had two chains of coffee shops; there are now - and can this be right? - 5,000. That the other main locations were the gang's spacious roof apartments apparently had a huge impact on property prices in Manhattan. Demand for loft space, as the com-mentary punned, "went through the roof".

Most convincingly, however, the programme argued that Friends changed our speech. The ironic rhetorical mode it pioneered - as in "Could that be any more embarrassing?" - was adopted by a generation. This is technically known as the Chandler-Binging of America.

What Friends really valued, naturally, was friendship. A facile jibe was that viewers watched because they did not have real friends of their own, but it did set high standards for all of ours. I wrote then that most people conclude that the really enduring bonds are made by blood and sex, but "for half an hour a week this programme sunnily convinces you there is a higher, Platonic love, fuelled only by coffee, youth and irony". The programme made friends God's apology for your dysfunctional parents and your nutty (or too-straight) lovers.

Yet, even in TV-land, reality could not for ever be held at bay. Jokes about age began to creep in. Babies started getting born. Parents got ill. Jobs got serious. Ironically - as Rachel was originally the feckless heiress who had to be persuaded to cut up her daddy's credit cards and get a job - it was her career that threatened the final geographical fissuring of the group when, in the last few episodes, she accepted a job and a new life in Paris (see also Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City).

But the inescapable urge to replace your old family with one of your own ultimately destroyed the group. Like nuclear fission, Monica and Chandler married each other. Phoebe battily married out to an homme serieux. And Ross and Rachel, whose relationship went like that rhyme about Henry VIII's wives - well, if you haven't watched the finale, don't let me tell you what you can guess. Only Joey, constitutionally unable to form lasting relationships, lives on, emotionally AWOL, to star in a West Coast spin-off.

The final episode does solve one mystery. "It was a happy place," opines Chandler as they leave the apartments for ever, "filled with love and laughter but, more important, because of rent control it was a frigging steal." So that's how they could afford it. Rachel suggests they get some coffee. "But where?" asks Chandler as they head, one last time, for that womblike sofa.

The true legacy of Friends lies not even in the high standards it set for friendship, but for comedy writing. In the documentary, we were shown script doctors interrogating an audience on whether they got a joke or if it needed to be refined. The writers, as much as the stars, were artists. Missing you already.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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