I couldn’t help but wonder …

… when did I become a die-hard Sex and the City fan? I never meant to. It entered my radar on hearsay as a sex comedy where a bunch of women slept around ‘like men’. The first episodes I watched laid out the remit fairly brutally: here are the rules for women and sex, let’s shake things up. The quotient of bare-chested men was a plus, and they always made New York look so beautiful and gutsy. Having caved in and bought the box-set, the evolution from sex dramedy, to women’s drama with comedy and sex, to just great drama is, in retrospect, triumphant. The key theme was never sex or men, it was friendship. When you have to let them all go at the end of that final episode, it hurts. That has to be good drama.

But now they’re back! For two hours anyway, and grateful we are for it too. Sex and the City: The Movie. It’s about now I realise I’m a die-hard. Chatting about the series in the weeks before the movie release, it seems I know everything about the show. I have watched it far more often than I realised. When I was going through a painful and excessive time in my life I watched it every day, it became a tonic. I couldn’t be hungover without it. I am here on the opening night of the movie. I am amongst the die-hards. They applaud when the theme tune begins and applaud again at the end. They drink home-made Cosmopolitans out of Lucozade bottles. Classy. I came to the movie without expectations or demands, just excitement. I left happy and a bit tearful, just like a good episode. I am writing this on my computer, alone in my apartment, while sirens wail outside my window. Don’t ask me if the movie’s any good. I’m far too biased to know.

Sex and the City Requiem

There’s no arguing that the writing was, at times, perfection, and the bits that make you bawl are the real meat of the series, so here are my top five Sex and the City tear-jerkers of all time. Read ‘em and weep, and kiss those girls goodbye for the last time …

Time and Punishment (Season 4). After her affair with Big, Carrie is on her second chance with Aidan but he can’t reconcile himself to Big still being in her life. The pressure eventually crushes her and she stands in the doorway sobbing, ‘You have to forgive me. You have to forgive me …’ a dozen unbearable times.

My Motherboard, My Self (Season 4). Miranda has to walk down the aisle alone behind her mother’s coffin. Carrie sees her begin to crumple as she passes by and leaps up to hold her, kisses her hand, and they walk on together.

An American Girl In Paris (Part Une) (Season 6). Carrie is about to leave New York to move to Paris. At her goodbye lunch she asks the girls, ‘What if I had never met you?’ Floodgates.

An American Girl In Paris (Part Une) (Season 6). In the middle of her uninspiring speech at the Breast Cancer benefit, Samantha caves in to a tropical moment brought on by her chemotherapy and pulls off her wig, inspiring a room full of women to do the same in solidarity. Cue hankies as they stand and applaud. The audience were in fact real cancer patients for additional blubbage.

An American Girl In Paris (Part Deux) (Season 6). Charlotte and Harry finally get a letter from the adoption agency, including a photograph of a baby girl. Charlotte holds the photograph and tells Harry, ‘That’s our baby’. Sob.