TV Baftas 2019: Friends' Lack Of Diversity Called Out As David Schwimmer Presents Award

David continued: “Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it was a groundbreaking show in that fully half the cast were women, and I made sure we were all paid equally.”

Mohammed replied: “Wasn’t Courteney Cox making more than the rest of you when you first started?”

“Yes, that was a problem,” David joked. 

Friends has been called out for its all-white, all-heterosexual six main characters in recent times, especially as a new generation began watching the show when it arrived on Netflix last year.

Aisha Tyler, who played Ross’ love interest Dr Charlie Wheeler in the ninth series, recently told the Guardian she thought the show was an “unrealistic representation” of New York at the time. 

She said: “My character wasn’t written on the page to be a woman of colour, and I auditioned against a lot of other women of different ethnic backgrounds, so I like to think they picked me because I was the right person for the role.

“But I knew it was something new for the show, and it was really important because, the fact of the matter was, it was a show set in Manhattan that was almost entirely Caucasian. It was an unrealistic representation of what the real world looked like.”