IN the past few weeks the entire back catalogue of Friends has popped up on Netflix.

The 11-year-old expressed delight at this - despite the fact it is practically on a loop over on one of the myriad satellite channels and she has actually recorded the two-part finale in order to watch in the five minutes each week it has the cheek to not be on the schedule.

And this love for a programme which actually stopped being produced two years before she was born got me thinking about just what made it so special.

It is essentially an ensemble sit com about six people and their relationships. That’s it - they fell in love, had babies you never saw again, fell out of love and basically talked about it all (a lot) for a decade.

Once they had finished, the folks on How I met Your Mother and a host of others took up the baton with more talking and naval gazing with success, but not to the point of Friends which has its own annual festival.

You can go and sit in a mock-up of Central Perk and prop yourself up on a stool with a guitar, a la Phoebe. Or perch on a looky-likey sofa with a giant pretend cup of coffee.

Sensibly, the cast of Friends have not bowed to pressure to return despite no doubt lavish amounts of money being offered to them to do so.

They have also declined to do a film or even a one-off and for that I salute them.

Will & Grace, which probably never reached the giddy successes of Friends but gathered a huge following, has returned after a sizeable gap and it hasn’t exactly set the world alight.

And while it is a different style and era entirely - they really should have left Only Fools and Horses where it was once the Trotters had realized their ambition to be millionaires.

I still feel sad when I think about them ending up back in Nelson Mandela House even if the idea was they were poor but happy again. So I'm happy to think of them all gathered together in Monica’s flat for that final farewell - putting their keys down and leaving it empty but optimistic for the lives ahead of them.

I don’t want them to come back for us to find out Ross and Rachel didn’t manage to make it work after all and they are sharing custody of Emma who is now a precocious teen riddled with hormones.

Or that Monica and Chandler were victims of the 2009 bank collapse and had to sell their dream home and squash themselves back into the New York apartment.

What makes Friends so special is they went out on a high and left us all wanting more. And that is how it should stay.