Harry Styles’s sister, Alesha Dixon, Jordan from Rizzle Kicks, some people from Made in Chelsea and Brian McFadden are leading a huge queue, by a gigantic cake covered in a duck, a chick, a monkey and coffee cups, waiting for a picture with a middle-aged man. It’s not a dream, or the set-up to an incredible joke – it’s the launch of FriendsFest, and the crowd is dying for a selfie with James Michael Tyler. Or Gunther, as he is probably called every day of his life.
Before Sunday, 5,400 fans will walk into an east-London warehouse, transformed into the ultimate Friends exhibition. You can have your hair blow-dried into any “Rachel” era you fancy, walk around a scale-model of Monica’s apartment, play foosball, sit on a La-Z-Boy chair, have coffee in a Central Perk, sit on an orange velvet couch, look at real props (The white dog! Buffay The Vampire Layer on VHS!) and pose by a fountain with umbrellas. Let’s just say it’s immersive.
Tickets to FriendsFest sold out in 13 minutes – why is everyone still so infatuated with the 21-year-old sitcom that they would rush to visit a replica set and some props?
Well, the show elicits strong emotional responses – everyone at the launch party is as enthusiastic about being there as Joey at Thanksgiving dinner. “I’ve dreamt of this moment – some people think it’s exciting being a pop star, but it doesn’t compare to being in the living room of Monica,” Jordan from Rizzle Kicks tells us. Could he be any more excited?
It’s also just so relatable. The walls are adorned with instantly recognisable stills from Friends episodes, but also life – marriages, babies, break-ups, visiting your brother at uni and fancying his roommate … getting bad hair from a humid holiday.
It’s a hug of a show where no one is ever properly sad; whole jokes are based around Phoebe being a homeless teenager. The theme tune sings “I’ll be there for you” and there’s a landline in Monica’s apartment – it feels like a simpler time (although there would have been less confusion about whether Rachel and Ross were “on a break” if they’d had WhatsApp).
Designer Seamus Stack spent two and half weeks recreating Monica’s purple-hued apartment by looking at screenshots and watching “quite a few” episodes. They’ve done an incredible job – attendees run around taking Shepherd’s pie trifle out of the fridge, doing arm wrestles at the table and pretending to stare at Ugly Naked Guy from the window. “People will have the closest experience to being in a Friends episode as possible,” says Stack. “It’s probably one of the most iconic interiors that exists on television.”
And in a post-Friends, camera-phone era, that’s the other appeal: taking selfies in that iconic interior, where the Wi-Fi code is purposefully displayed on the wall. One fan, Saphia, has taken 374 photos in three hours. Another, Olivia, is on 247, but is intensely jealous of the two girls who nabbed the wedding dresses out of the photo-booth dressing-up box and took a picture sitting on Monica’s couch.
Finally, I turn to the man-of-the-moment, James/Gunther. Why is everyone so obsessed? “If I knew the real answer to that I would’ve bottled it and sold it,” he says. And the writers of The Big Bang Theory would’ve bought it, I guess.
Comedy Central’s FriendsFest is at The Boiler House, Brick Lane, London E1 until 20 September.
