She wants to change the world
Adapted from the popular novel, there are plenty of enjoyable and humorous moments in Netflix’s version of One Day and Edinburgh looks gorgeous, writes Aidan Smith
There’s so much stuff around these days and I’m always suspicious of people who give the impression they’ve seen and heard and read and devoured everything – all the hot films and happening music and zeitgeisty books and provocative podcasts and searing think-pieces and, of course, every impossibly cool telly drama.
I mean, they can’t have kids. Or real jobs. Or weekends dictated by the optimum moment for visiting a freshly restocked Aldi.
I don’t think One Day (Netflix) would call itself impossibly cool, but that’s OK. Five million read and loved the novel by David Nicholls and just about everyone was disappointed by the movie. Apparently. For I come to Netflix’s version ignorant of both, but am well qualified to answer this question – what have they done to my city?
Firstly, is it really Edinburgh? A party is in full swing, but the revellers look like the Bullingdon Club (Junior Section) on Tour. No one really dances like this unless on screen – arms twirling, pre-raphaelite hair flying. Are there any Scots here at all? Oh, it’s an Edinburgh Uni bash, celebrating graduation day. A young man is comatose on the cobbles. He’s called Callum and so is probably Scottish. Over the urgent beat of S’express, one would-be master of the universe makes a plan with another: “See you in London, yah?”
But very quickly I can put aside my chippy class prejudices and enjoy the romcom of Emma and Dexter, opposites attracted to each other on July 15, 1988, with each episode checking in on them, same day every year. Don’t tell me if they end up living happily ever after, all you know-it-all, see-it-alls, I want to find out for myself.
Emma has swotted to First-class Hons and calls Dexter “2.2 Boy”. She’s awkward in her own skin while he luxuriates in his. She wants to change the world while he wants to cavort in it on an ever-recurring gap year.
“What do you want to be when you’re 40?” she asks. He says: “Am I allowed to say rich?” She predicts his life by that stage: “Riding round Kensington or Chelsea in a tiny sports car, hiding a little paunch under the steering wheel, wind blowing through your widow’s peak, on your third marriage or maybe fourth, her with her 200 shiny white teeth and thick as mince.” Perhaps not surprising, they don’t shag on their first night together. But he says: “Not having sex with you is highly memorable.”
Do we know these two? At first I can’t quite place them, but then, ah yes, Ambika Mod was the junior doctor who sunk under pressure in This Is Going to Hurt and Leo Woodall was in The White Lotus as a more sinister young Romeo. Now as the leads they’re every bit as winsome as Daisy Edgar-jones and Paul Mescal in Normal People, TV’S last great burst of young love. There are slight similarities: in both, the girls are superbright, the boys super-popular. Normal People, with its pained silences, was right for lockdown, but I’m enjoying the sarky humour in One Day, most of it coming from Emma’s spiky tongue.
In the second episode she has a hilariously horrible time performing agitprop theatre to bored schoolkids in Wolverhampton. There are fumblings in the back of a van with the director, though here she must do the directing (Him, rummaging: “Left … or stage left? Her, exasperated: “Just left!”). Meanwhile Dexter’s in Rome indulging in another bout of athletic bonking. Mummy doesn’t approve of his “silly sexpots” and admires Emma’s ballsiness: “She came to dinner, got drunk, shouted about the miners’ strike and called your father a bourgeois fascist.” Oh, and Edinburgh is gorgeous but, pre-golden Turd and the decline of Princes Street, when has it ever not been?