'Friends' and gritty passion

The great thing about being ill, 

is that you feel perfectly entitled to slob around with your box set of Friends. Friends might not be everybody's favourite, but for me the show has always been perfect escapism. In the world of Friends, everything is safe, reasonably predictable, and prettily coloured in hues of purple.

In the special features section, I found a 'making of' documentary. And I discovered that there was nothing escapist going on behind the scenes.

The word passion gets thrown around really easily these days, but wow – I was fascinated to learn about whole squads of writers working on thrashing out scripts through the night, often going on until 6am. About set builders throwing up sets and tearing them down again according to how the stories were developing. About the painstaking post production process – foley artists throwing rice around in a little sound-proof cupboard, editors agonising over which shot to go with...

all so that I can sit in bed with a packet of Jammy Dodgers and chortle my way through another episode.

It takes passion to get through the grit and create magic. Thanks, guys!

And, here's the drawing I said I would share with you today:

Pearl