‘CHANDLER is dead’. Sad face emoji.

On Sunday morning I woke up to this post on our family WhatsApp group. It was sad news, and we all felt it - those of us who watched Friends first time around in the Nineties and the Gen Zers (“the kids” as I call them) who’ve grown up with it on telly. That says a lot about the loss of Matthew Perry.

He was, after all, Chandler Bing, whose one-liners are comedy shorthand in our family. “Could I BE any more sad?” was my nephew Jack’s WhatsApp tribute on Sunday morning.

I was sad but not surprised to hear of Perry’s death, aged 54. Last year I read his book, which lays bare, with brutal honesty, the demons that plagued him for decades. He had been close to death before, several times. While we were falling in love with Chandler back in the day, Matthew Perry was a troubled soul, struggling with crippling drug and alcohol addiction.

He revealed in his book that you can tell from the way he looks in each series of Friends what he was on at the time - pills when he’s thin, booze when he’s bloated.

In Friends, he was one sixth of an ensemble of fine comic actors, but there was something about Chandler. It is said that Perry was the only member of the cast allowed to sit with the writers of the US sitcom, and they drew on the actor’s own comic genius. But he was ravaged with self doubt. As he revealed on the Friends reunion show in 2021, he agonised every day over whether his lines would get enough laughs.

There were parallels between Perry and Chandler - both were an only child, with troubled childhoods and abandonment issues, and both used humour to cope with life’s challenges. “It wasn’t that I thought I could play Chandler. I was Chandler,” Perry wrote.

It was his exquisite comic timing and sublime sarcasm that set him apart, and in the end it was a haunting performance.

I am sad about Matthew Perry because he was my generation. I was in my twenties when Friends began. I was sharing a house with friends - and on Friday nights we’d watch this show about a group of twenty-somethings sharing apartments. It resonated. Friends co-creators Marta Kaufman and David Crane drew on their experiences living with room-mates in New York. It was their love letter to that brief time when your friends are your family.

I loved those years. The rent was cheap, we piled into the pub after work, we were still young enough to get away with doing daft stuff. We laughed a lot. When the Central Perk gang turned 30, so did we. And when they started to break away and settle into grown-up life, we did too.

But Friends never went away. It’s always on TV, somewhere. My niece and nephews have grown up watching it. Of course, it’s a bit dated now, but it’s still funny. I sometimes stick an episode on if I’m feeling a bit ‘meh’ - Friends hits the spot if it ‘it hasn’t been your day, your week or even your year’ - and it’s Chandler who makes me laugh the most.

The lines live on. “He’s a Transponster,” we say, when we have no idea what someone’s job is. “There was something wrong with the left phalange!” said my sister recently, after her flight was delayed. If you know Friends, you know the quotes.

Friends has been around most of my adult life. In and among the razor-sharp one-liners and cutesy group hugs was a comedy about the human condition: Rachel the spoilt narcissist, Monica the neurotic control freak, Joey the goofy slacker, Ross the nerd with anger issues, Phoebe the eccentric and Chandler the commitment-phobe using gags to deflect self-loathing. Maybe we all recognise something of ourselves in that lot.

There are dreadful things happening in the world right now. With unimaginable horror unfolding in the Middle East, it could be argued that, when it comes to mourning a wealthy Hollywood star, found dead in his LA hot tub, we need some perspective.

But it’s not really about that. A sad loss is a sad loss. And watching Friends will never be the same again.