One of the unexpected outcomes of moving 10 minutes from my office is that I’ve been watching more episodes of Friends recently. Turns out there really isn’t anything worth rushing home for TV wise in that 5-6pm slot. And as E4 shows around 5,574 episodes of Friends per week, it really is hard to avoid.

I have a theory that I developed a while ago that there’s an episode of Friends relevant to any given situation. Sometimes what it has to teach us isn’t that useful – like when I was homeless recently and the Friends episode I watched happened to concern Rachel needing to find somewhere to live. Her salvation took the shape of several men who were secretly in love with her – this did not help me AT ALL. Like I say, relevant but not entirely useful. This is because 75% of the characters on Friends are really annoying. So that’s 4.5 of the main six peeps.

However, Joey who is somewhat a Cassandra figure in Friends in that he’s largely dismissed does often have sound advice. In the episode ‘The one with Monica’s thunder’ Chandler has a particularly male problem in the bedroom department. He turns to his buddy Joey for advice. Chandler asks him if he’s ever experienced this problem himself. “Yeah, once,” says Joey. Chandler asks him what he did about it and, as you must remember because this episode has probably been on five times today already, Joey says: “I did it anyway.”

Today, looking glumly at my leg I thought to myself ‘If Joey had shin splints, what would he do?’. You know what he’d do – he’d run anyway and so will I. And this us why Joey was the only one to get a spinoff series. Shame that didn’t work out for him.
Next week: What we can learn about marathon running from Frasier Crane.