“If you keep talking like that, I’m going to have to charge you by the hour,” said Carrie, sounding like Groucho Marx, when Samantha rang about a sexual encounter.īut most of the jokes were dramatically ironic, quite funny but introducing a difficulty. Verbally, some of the humour was traditional New York wisecracking. I liked, though, the visual gag of an upholstered chair in Charlotte’s room being in its transparent plastic wrapping still. The four friends’ apartments we were shown resembled smart hotel rooms, which never feel homely. Reality was altogether uncertain in this 25-minute edit of life. No, the odd thing was that Carrie, the dominant narrator with the horsey chin, went around in a fur coat. I certainly wouldn’t recognise it, though, as a marker of women’s autonomy and liberation. (“Men don’t marry the Up-the-Butt Girls,” she observes.) This is not, as it happens, something I’ve ever been attracted to, though I’ve known people who have. The strangest thing in it was not Charlotte’s uncertainty whether to go through with anal sex. Now, taking advice, I plunged in at episode four: Valley of the Twenty-Something Guys.

That is what I assumed Sex and the City was like when the series began in 1998.

I felt as King Pentheus must have done just before the Maenads tore him apart. One day, on the Barcelona metro, the doors opened and a small crowd of half-clothed women bundled in – a pre-wedding hen party – one of them brandishing a huge pink dildo.

Fantasy valley city art