So did it teach us anything that came in useful along the way?

Female fans of Sex And The City never hesitated when Carrie asked them to choose between man or Manolo. But what did male viewers think of the show's bedroom antics and explicit girl talk?

Jay Rayner, The Observer's restaurant critic

When Sex and the City first aired in 1998 it was customary to praise the frank and detailed way in which the women it featured talked about sex, and the education that dialogue could offer the male audience. Perhaps for others, but not for this male. Then again my mother is agony aunt Claire Rayner and so in my childhood home, getting women to talk in a frank and detailed way about sex wasn't a revelation; it was just mummy's job.

What made Sex and the City work was not the subject matter, but the complete believability of the characters. We'd had comedies about sex and relationships before. Friends was still on the air at the time and it dealt with similar subjects but, with its laughter track and pantomime set ups, it was Dad's Army to Sex and the City's M*A*S*H. Carrie Bradshaw was not simply the kind of heroine we all cheered for. She could be a total heel, a bitch, a desperately unreliable witness to her own life. And yet we still cheered her on.

The show's huge audience appeal worked liked this. Women watched Sex and the City for the machine gun dialogue, the honest depictions of sexually active female lives, for the emotional narrative, the fab dresses and shoes. Men watched it to work out which one they fancied.

It was never Samantha. We weren't put off by her predatory sexual instincts. That was fine. We liked that. The problem was that she, alone among the quartet, was just a little too lightly drawn. What would you talk to Samantha about afterwards? Charlotte, of course, had the uptight quasi-virgin thing going on; a believable enough theme, but it looked a little bit too much like hard work.

That left Carrie, who was kooky and funny, and Miranda, who was whip-smart and smouldering. Obviously, in my case, it was always Miranda. I just have a thing for the brainy girls. Unless it was Carrie. Or Charlotte. Or, when I was a bottle to the bad, Samantha. Though it might have been Carrie. Then again, Charlotte... You get the general idea. Of such things are blockbuster TV shows made.

Toby Young, author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

I lived in New York for five years and in my experience such behaviour was typical. Attractive single girls not only dropped their 'dates' at the slightest whiff of a bigger, better deal, they routinely betrayed their girlfriends, too. The sisterhood of Sex and the City - the notion that girls like Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda will always be there for each other, no matter what the cost - is a sentimental myth.

Does this matter? After all, Sex and the City does not claim to be a documentary. So what if its characters are nicer than their real-life counterparts? The reason it matters, I think, is that the solidarity among the four main characters is what makes the world they find themselves in so attractive. The message of Sex and the City is that the Manhattan marriage market is an absolute hoot. Forcing your feet into a pair of six-inch heels as you tramp from one singles bar to the next is not a form of torture that these women are forced to endure in order to attract a husband; rather, it is a post-feminist 'choice'.

Once you remove the pixie dust of female camaraderie, contemporary New York emerges as an essentially pre-feminist society in which the courtship rituals are strikingly similar to those depicted in the novels of Jane Austen. Women are second-class citizens who are expected to use their youth and beauty as commodities in order to secure their economic wellbeing. Sex and the City is set in this world, but it conceals its brutality behind a veneer of cocktails and laughter. In reality, female friendship is the first thing to be sacrificed in the cut-throat competition for rich husbands.

To my mind, Sex and the City is the equivalent of one of those Soviet propaganda films in which the factory workers are depicted as happy, singing citizens of tomorrow. The truth is that women like Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda are wretched, unhappy and isolated. The key to their survival is not the sisterhood, but a combination of slimming pills and anti-depressants.

Jeremy Langmead, editor of Esquire

Men were scared of Sex and the City. Not only did credit card debts soar as the show shamelessly plugged Manolos and Jimmy Choos (I think it's more to blame than sub-prime mortgages for the current credit crunch) but our physical and emotional foibles were cruelly exaggerated by an endless roll call of pathetic male characters. And instead of our other halves meeting up with friends to discuss Sontag, Sondheim and the Sudanese crisis, all they apparently talked about was sex and shopping.

We were shocked to discover that we were even more intellectually superior than we already thought: after all, men don't sit around sipping white wine giggling at the fact that their latest date has a strange-shaped nipple, or scream with excitement when a mate says the new DKNY sports pant is simply to die for.

To illustrate this point, I took notes of what my colleagues and I discussed over lunch this Friday at Soho Pizza:

1. Who would win a fight: a horse or an alligator?

2. Will Chelsea or Man U win the Premiership showdown?

3. Why, as you get older, do you always wake up early even at the weekend?

See? Much more challenging, isn't it?

However, the good news for blokes is that as most of the female population disappears in a fortnight to watch the movie, we'll finally be able to reclaim the telly.

Kwame Kwei-Armah, playwright and the first black Briton to have a play staged in the West End

A fever is about to grip the nation and I fear it's something not all the population of Great Britain is aware of. Say the names Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda to the average man in the street and I'll wager at best you'll get a shrug of the shoulders and a blank expression. Try same experiment with 99 percent of females and I believe that quite the reverse will happen. Pupils will widen, teeth will appear and apart from instantly articulating the release dates of the Sex and the City movie in all the major territories of the world, a certain lightness of being will be evident.

To test my hypothesis, I called all of - well, a handful of - my female friends and within moments I was informed how many boxed sets they possessed, how important the series had been to them, and that they and their entire female posse had already booked babysitters for the opening weekend of the movie.

What I found most interesting, however, was that when I asked my girlfriends what factors made the series so great, not one of them mentioned the S-word. 'It's the glamour I love', said one; 'fashion'; 'the friendships'; 'the shoes' - everything except the SEX. This seemed odd to me, because every time I caught glimpse of an episode, people were forever sexing and talking about how good or bad the guys were, and how big or small his member and ability to commit was. Which, I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed. Any series that breaks taboos in such a stylish way should quite rightly be lauded. And though I have to admit I will not be eagerly queuing on May 28, awaiting the arrival of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda to the big screen, I know that many of my sisters will - and for the next few days at least the spirit of joyousness will reign supreme. And that can only be all good for me, and all the men I know.

Derek Draper, former new Labour insider and lobbyist, now a psychotherapist

'Which one would you...?', was a universal, and rather crude, question among my single, late-twenties friends back in the late 90s. Now, a decade later, the girls are back, this time on the big screen, and in the meantime my mates and I have all settled down with wives and kids. To echo Carrie's erstwhile show opener, I got to wondering, did Sex and the City teach us anything about women that came in useful along the way? At first glance I'm not so sure. For most of us, the show's central theme - that women had found a way of mixing feminism with femininity - just echoed what we already knew. But the central message of the show was a crucial one - that relationships matter and it takes a lot of sweat and heartache to choose the right one and make it work. What the show's male viewers picked up from all this was that our female counterparts, however exciting their own lives were, hadn't given up on us but that they wouldn't settle for second best.

Witnessing the return of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte, I have no doubt that men everywhere will be asking each other again the old, crude question but maybe, now we're older, we'll also be asking a more mature question: which one would we most like to be married to? And why?

Lemn Sissay, poet and artist at The South Bank centre

Like everyone else I had to watch the programme - it had the word 'sex' in the title and I am a guy - and to be frank I enjoyed the sex, the women and the city, New York. They're all gorgeous. But if Sex and the City is as honest about women as it is about race then by watching I was entering the sticky realms of fantasy. Let's not pretend it was anything else.

Every black American male or female, knew from the start that like the other international hit, Friends, Sex and the City was just not about them. By exclusion from one of the most cosmopolitan and racially mixed cities of the world, the message was abundantly clear - this one is not for you.

Jeez, you cannot get more cosmopolitan than Manhattan: Hispanic, Asian and black people make up more than 50 per cent of the population of the city. You can't step on a passer-by without having to apologise in four languages.

The truth is, there's nothing wrong with a show about white girls and their inner city lives - black folks have had their inner city lives portrayed throughout TV's short history. If there were too many black people in the show it couldn't be called Sex and the City anyway. It'd have to be called 'Sex in the Inner City' or 'Sex in the Urban Environment' or Sex on the Streets'. Yawn.