Everything I know about...

... being old and crabby

I wasn’t at all sure about the TV adaptation of Everything I Know About Love, the screen adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s bestseller of the same name.

First, I know Dolly a little bit and I like her, it’s really impossible not to. (Cosmo Landesman once described Dolly to me as a “one-woman 80s heavy metal band”.) It’s very hard to regard any sort of art made by someone you know, even a little bit, because you can’t possibly view it clearly. Do I like this art because I like this person? Do I hate this art because I like this person but do not want them to succeed too much? Do I like this art because I am lying to myself and suppressing feelings of wanting this person to fail because I know them…? and on it goes. Second, EIKAL, the book, I liked - but it did not get me in the guts the way it got some people because I just didn’t relate. My twenties were miles away from the joyful flat-share party atmosphere, the risk-taking sort of puppyish exuberance. My twenties, on reflection, were extremely lonely and bleak. THIRD! The opening love interest, a sort of scrawny troubadour, Pete Doherty manqué, wearing a fucking hat, was the sort of guy I would get up and change train carriages to get away from and there was the dazzling - dazzling - Emma Appleton playing the Maggie/Dolly character actually going in for a snog! Puke.

Anyway, I pushed on with the series and I’m glad I did because it’s very good. I watched about five episodes in a row and then dreamt about Dolly all night, which was no bad thing. Emma Appleton really is magnetic, charismatic and true to this character, which some of my Gen X/ageing millennial readers might possibly instinctively find annoying with her sequins and enthusiasm and refusal to go to bed. But the character is whole, rounded and authentic: she means it, she is a genuine hot mess. Her counterpoint, Birdy, is terrific - uptight and mumsy, (as the woman who has a meal plan and lays out tomorrow’s school uniforms at night, I had a hard relate to her, let me tell you).

The scene where Birdy freaks out because partygoers are racking up rails of party drugs on her “for best” salmon platter is excellent. The sequence where Maggie refuses to go to bed and instead takes a taxi to Liverpool to find the one friend in her phone who is awake at 4.30am, (a famous take-out from the book), made me feel faintly sick from the stress of being awake for that long. I have never not wanted to go to bed. The bit where she gets high with her landlord in order to get them off that month’s rent is also really a sort of masterclass in writing and directing, with superb acting performances. It looks like it was a laugh.

If you can, as I managed to, possibly put aside for a moment your peri-menopausal rage at young, beautiful, successful Dolly making a show about young, beautiful and successful people, you will enjoy this.