I’m not normally one for nostalgia – but the Sex and the City reboot feels embarrassingly comforting

I want to live now, to be part of the future – but the past is a powerful draw when the present seems so bleak, writes Katy Brand

‘Sex and the City’ has spawned two films – and now a reboot (Getty)

A few years ago I was invited to perform at a comedy event staged at a history festival deep in the West Country. I took the train through the rolling countryside down to the site. It was a beautiful sunny day. A man in a classic car picked me up from the station. He wore a straw hat. We parped along the country lanes, chatting merrily, and it all felt like I had stepped into a bygone era.

That sense of being in a time warp only increased when we pulled into a field already full of little tents and marquees. There was bunting, a brass band played, someone handed me a scone. People were in costume, mainly from the 1930s and 1940s. Some wore Second World War military dress (of the Allied Forces variety, I hasten to add). There was a much admired Spitfire parked in the middle of the grass.

It was a lovely, gentle afternoon. I took the return train home as the sun set, feeling hazy and full of cups of tea, and some forgotten sense of “Englishness” that I had never really known. But I was also relieved to be heading back to the city, because I knew I had spent the day in a bubble. And though some people choose to live in something akin to that bubble all the time – and it suits them – it wasn’t for me.

Oh no. I liked life real, and dirty. I could cope with whatever it threw at me. I didn’t need make-believe and dress-up. I was truly a “Woman of Now”. As my train pulled into huge, smelly, ever-bordering-on-furious Waterloo station, I was glad to be back in London. London, now, in the present. My time. I fitted here. I didn’t need to live in the past.

So, I assumed I wasn’t vulnerable to the seductive whispers of “nostalgia”. I thought I was above all that sentimental nonsense. That was for people who couldn’t accept the times we live in, who couldn’t accept they were getting older, and that the generational baton was being passed on. I felt sure I would always be happy to embrace everything the present moment has to offer, with gusto and gumption.

However, lately – at the age of 42 – I have been feeling increasingly politically, personally, even professionally out of place in the here and now. Sometimes I find modern debate confusing in its content, and frightening in its vigour. I don’t know all the names of the main influencers and I am still not personally convinced that wearing bikinis can be a career. I don’t ever want to wear a pair of Google glasses. I have had an urge to hide for the first time in my life, to go “back”. But back where?

And then last week, a new series of Sex and the City was announced. Watching the online trailer felt like home. Embarrassingly so. Suddenly I found myself with a curious yearning for a time when I was in my late teens and early twenties, and this new show about four fearless female friends living impossibly fast and glamorous lives in New York was dominating my attention. I felt excited. I felt (cringe) young.

SATC was launched in the USA in 1998. It was based on the 1997 book and column of the same name by journalist and author Candace Bushnell, and by the time it reached the UK a little while later it was already a massive hit. Created and written by Darren Starr and starring Sarah Jessica Parker as the writer Carrie, along with Kim Cattrall as Samantha, Cynthia Nixon as Miranda, and Kristin Davis as Charlotte, the show ran for 94 episodes until 2004. It also spawned two feature films, the first of which felt inevitable and watchable. The less said about the second the better.

Its legacy was clear – it arguably paved the way for shows such as Girls by Lena Dunham and Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. But what once seemed shocking and taboo-busting for the four SATC women and their rampant sex lives, would seem terribly tame now in 2021. In an age where we have stand-up comedian London Hughes performing her show To Catch A Dick on wide release via Netflix, I worry the return of SATC will feel like watching your mum’s auntie trying to be shocking by mouthing the word blow job when she’s had a bit too much prosecco? And more worryingly, AM I THAT AUNTIE NOW?

The world moves on. SATC had its faults – a huge lapse in diverse casting among them – but it was a really great piece of entertainment in its time. It caught the feeling of the moment. It kept us laughing, it comforted us when we felt down about our own inevitable romantic disasters and missteps, it educated us about the various kinks and sexual preferences “out there”. And it made shopping for extremely expensive shoes feel somehow empowering. But most of all, it gave me, as a young woman, a kind of template for taking charge of my life.

Hearing the news it is coming back (minus Cattrall sadly, but then again, among my friends there was always the feeling that you came for Samantha, but stayed for Miranda, so maybe it’s not the end of the world) made me feel 20 again, for a moment. It reminded me of that time in the late Nineties, when Labour was newly in power, Britannia was cool, and things could only get better. Given the state of the world today, in 2021, could you blame me for wanting to go back there? And even stay for a little while?

I don’t know if the new SATC will find its place in a world where everyone is now talking about their sex lives openly, all the time. Will it try to somehow recapture what it once was, or as someone pointed out on Twitter, frame our three remaining heroines as “white, rich, overprivileged and entitled Karens” in a world of resentful and contemptuous millennials.

That remains to be seen. But nostalgia is a powerful thing. I see that now. The present seems bleak, with the UK government equivocating again on feeding hungry children in lockdown, or how fast they can roll out the vaccine, or whether Brexit is going to lead to food shortages.

I feel a new urge to retreat to my own twenties, when everything felt easier and better, and I was younger, stronger and full of potential. It’s a powerful drug. I now get why all those history buffs wanted to go back to what they also believed was a simpler time, the 1940s, with clear-cut good guys and bad guys. When the world feels confusing, you want the comfort of the past.

I want to live now, to be part of the future, so I will try to resist the desire to create a full-blown SATC experience in a field in Wiltshire, but if things continue as they are, I can’t guarantee that I won’t. You’re more than welcome to join me there.