This Life review: When you lift the rose-tinted glasses, This Life hasn't aged too well
What were you doing 30 years ago? I was a reporter on a free weekly paper in Liverpool, enjoying my princely eight grand a year salary, getting caught up in Britpop and Three Lions and watching This Life.
To mark it's 30th anniversary – which scarcely seems possible, to be honest – the BBC is repeating the series (BBC4, Weds, 10pm and iPlayer) along with a new show in which Daniela Nardini, who played thrusting young lawyer Anna, remembers making it.
It's a nice exercise in nostalgia, and reminds you of the alchemy of casting, Nardini remembers auditioning for the role with Jack Davenport (who played Miles), and you can't imagine anyone else in the part. You can't imagine anyone more perfectly Anna.
It leads you to look back through the haze of memory, to when you were watching This Life for the first time. The same age as the characters, the same worries about jobs, life, the meaning of success, love and loss.
There was always one character you could identify with, whether it was posh(ish) Miles, his patina of Paul Smith jackets and playing the corporate game hiding an abiding love for Anna.
It might have been Egg (Andrew Lincoln), trapped into a career he knew he didn't want, at the same time as being mystified as to what his next move might be.
Maybe you were Anna, or Milly? Anna is free-spirited and wilful, living in the moment but also jealous of the contentment Milly finds in order and routine. Milly, meanwhile, resents being the adult of the shared south London house they all live in, and admires Anna's independence.
The nostalgia's great, of course – it's tempting to wallow in the rose-tinted netherworld of remembrance, when we were all lissom and fancy-free, smoking our Marlboro Golds, drinking K cider in the sun and hoping we'd get to the end of the month without exceeding our overdraft limit.
But when you actually watch the show, you hope we were never that self-centred and uncaring.
You can see how This Life, with it's shaky, verite camera, liberal attitude to nudity and swearing and desire to 'shake things up' has influenced programme-making ever since.
You can see it did break new ground, and present young adults in a way that hadn't been seen before – that drug-taking didn't necessarily lead to dying in a dirty toilet, that sex wasn't a one-way ticket to pregnancy or disease, and that you could both care about having a career and enjoy a social life without one compromising the other.
But did they have to be so annoying about it?
Egg blows up his life without talking to his girlfriend of five years, Milly. Doesn't consider it, doesn't do lists of pros and cons, just drops out, does nothing and then blames Milly for being resentful about supporting him.
Miles has clearly been 40 since birth, despite his apparent rule-breaking, the living embodiment of the Steve Buscemi’s 'hello, fellow kids' meme.
Maybe we are self-centred when we're young. Maybe we have to be to carve out our place in the world, to begin finding our way. Before we have to make compromises so lives with partners, children, elderly parents can work.
But the constant shaking of the camera, the desire to shock, to break boundaries – Anna's relationship with Egg's dad springs to mind, something Daniela Nardini agrees Anna should never have countenanced – does begin to grate, and the treatment of gay housemate Warren, initially at least, is problematic.
After all, when I became a man I put away childish things, so maybe it's best to leave This Life to nostalgia, to let it lie with Big Night Out, consign it to history with Gazza and the dentist's chair.
I'll leave it in the rosy glow of my memory, and recommend it to my kids. Let a whole new generation see themselves on screen.