Frasier has aged so well – but rewatching it has left me feeling dated

Where once he saw a character resembling his dad, Will Gore now sees in Frasier Crane too much of himself

When I first watched the show, Frasier (or at least, the actor who played him, Kelsey Grammer) was – or so I assumed – about the same age as my father (Getty)

We all face moments of reckoning in our lives – but rarely do they come while viewing a repeat of an American sitcom that originally aired two decades ago. And yet this was the situation I faced last week as, from the comfort of my sofa, I became increasingly discomfited at what I saw before me on the TV.

Frasier, the show in question, is patently one of the comedic greats. A rare example of a spin-off being better than the original, it ran for just over a decade from 1993, and has since been repeated almost as regularly as Friends. Oddly, those two powerhouses of US light comedy ran almost exactly concurrently: and while I adore both, one has aged much better than the other.

That’s not to say that there isn’t the odd wincey moment in Frasier, but much of the humour – a mix of brilliantly delivered lines and situational high farce – remains surprisingly fresh. And whereas in Friends the smugness is often unintended and now grates, in Frasier, it exists deliberately to be laughed at.