How would we have made it through the pandemic without nostalgia TV?

The ‘Friends’ reunion has provided us with the blast-from-the-past fix that dreams are made of, writes Harriet Hall

Covid perk: Jennifer Aniston et al were friends reunited (EPA)

It’s hard to imagine how we would have clung onto our sanity during three national lockdowns without the aid of streaming services. Come to think of it, it’s a wonder more conspiracy theorists haven’t attempted to connect Ted Sarandos and Jeff Bezos with the genesis of Covid-19.

Alongside the key workers that kept the world turning, there sat Netflix, Amazon Prime, NOW and Apple TV: our entertainment saviours that prevented us from having to actually speak to our partners or take up needlepoint to distract ourselves from the apocalypse.

Though the virus put paid to TV and film production for months, this ultimately didn’t matter for those of us craving, not newness, but comfort in the old. Our collective desire to stick our heads in the sand and pretend we were in fact home by choice, manifested in a yearning to revisit old reliable favourites.