Over the weekend I found myself ‘tearing up’ over the news that Matthew Perry had died, aged not much older than my wife and I. I had to explain to my soon-to-be 18-year-old son why I felt emotional about ‘losing someone’ I had never met.

I felt I had lost a genuine ‘Friend’.

I explained that, like many in my generation who came of age or were young adults in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Matthew Perry and his character, Chandler, along with the whole crew of Friends – Rachel, Ross, Monica, Joey and Phoebe – had consumed copious amounts of...