After the travesty of the last adaptation of David Nicholl’s One Day I had forgotten that the novel is quite good. I was too distracted by Anne Hathaway’s abysmal Leeds accent, which many have compared to Dick Van Dyke’s cockney in Mary Poppins.
Anne Hathaway’s was worse.
It wasn’t just her accent that was all wrong for the character of Emma Morley. Hathaway has a certain knowingness about her beauty—she can look frumpy or she can look absolutely beautiful, but when she’s frumpy you can tell she’s putting it on. But Ambika Mod, the new Anne Hathaway, is completely convincing as a frumpy uni graduate with a first in English.
She is also beautiful, but she doesn’t know it. She has a slightly resting bitch face which we viewers know is hiding an inner vulnerability and a little bit of judgment of other people—but Dexter, who is constantly aspiring to win her approval, thinks she is judging him.
She is a bit.
Also Dexter does not make it obvious that he wants her approval—his vulnerability is hidden beneath his boyish bravado and sparkling blue eyes. Leo Woodall as Dexter nails it.
One Day at first seems like a generic boy-meets-girl romcom but the clever framing device gives us glimpses into the characters’ lives over time. Each episode takes place on St Swithin’s Day, July 15, one year from the preceding one.
Dex and Em meet at their graduation ball in 1989 and become unlikely but firm friends. Dex is the hot posh boy that every girl dreams about but very few have spoken to, and Emma is the smart bookish girl who thinks nobody notices her. But they do.
On the night they meet, Dex admits he’s ‘seen her around.’ This is shocking to Emma and also to us—Dexter is not the type to go for geeky girls. But there is an undeniable attraction between them which, over time, slips into the friend zone. They kiss on the first night they meet and almost sleep together.
The novelty of this series is that every episode feels pivotal to the characters’ lives—the fact they didn’t sleep together on day one means that they spend the next decade dating other people and pretending that they were always just friends.
Every time they meet up it seems promising—golden hour on a balcony in Greece; skinny-dipping in the harbour at midnight; drinking wine on Primrose Hill in the afternoon sun. How do they mess this up? But they do every time. Their conversations are brilliantly paced and tense—you can see the tide turning and suddenly they’re arguing again. It’s maddening and believable and beautiful all at once.
Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall as Em and Dex are brilliant—it’s hard to imagine them in any other roles, starring opposite any other actors. Woodall plays charm and coked-up debauchery equally well; he leaves uni with ambitions of becoming rich and famous, though you can tell there’s a part of him that wants to find meaning and a purpose in life.
Later in a conversation with his mother, he admits he might like to try photojournalism. She laughs in his face, recalling the embarrassing phase when he took endless photographs of gravel in their drive, for a ‘study in texture.’ His mother later nags him for not finding a meaningful career.
How could he when no one, not even his mother, ever took him seriously? Dexter’s descent into depression and addiction seems inevitable—but would it have happened if he was with Emma? Steady, dependable Emma holds her secret dreams of becoming an actress or a playwright, but she ends up working in a Mexican-themed restaurant performing ‘La Cucaracha’ every half an hour.
In one memorable scene, Dex turns up to the restaurant with a sexy TV actress, to ‘surprise’ Emma at work. She stands in her green uniform top and visor, rigid with rage and embarrassment, while Dex slips a hefty tip into her hand. He doesn’t think that he’s humiliating her. ‘Take it,’ he says. ‘It’s a gift.’ ‘Cash isn’t a gift, Dex,’ she says. And friends don’t treat other friends like they’re staff.
Dex is a TV star (‘I’m a minor celebrity, he tells his dying mother) and the gulf between him and Em widens with the years. When he tells her the cliched and fateful words: ‘Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach,’ it could be the end of the friendship.
He’s too high to realise that he’s just torn her whole life to shreds, and she’s too fed up and hurt to see that he’s having a breakdown and lashing out at the person who means most to him in the world. While the show wears a little towards the end—there are only so many times we can see Leo Woodall looks depressed and tense—it is such a highly realistic depiction of Gen X and millennial life, in which dreams are kindled in adolescence only to be dashed against the rocks of real grown-up life.
There is a shocking and slightly unfair ending—after all the energy we’ve put into rooting for Dex and Em, their happiness is pretty short-lived—the story is ultimately about the cruel unpredictability of life and the random encounters that can change it forever.
