Everything I Know About Love
BBC1 | ★★★✩✩

Here’s everything I know about Everything I Know About Love: its seven episodes are adapted by Dolly Alderton from her bestselling autobiographical book of the same name. It’s set in 2012 and follows Dolly’s avatar, Maggie, a 24-year-old who’s just moved to London with some female university mates, with particular focus on her best friend from school, Birdy. Birdy is Jewish and is played by Bel Powley, who is also Jewish.

That’s the easy bit. Writing down everything I feel about the show is going to be much trickier. I’m conflicted, and not just from knowing Dolly a tiny bit. The problem is etched into the opening train scene. Maggie, played by Emma Appleton, meets a charming poetry-dropping bloke, and after arriving in London and sharing a kiss, she decides they shouldn’t exchange details in order to test if their perfect moment is destined to continue. Nice idea, except it’s close to the plot of romantic classic Before Sunrise. Now does Maggie know that, and consciously or not she’s trying to replicate that drama in her own life, a quintessentially 20s trait, or are we meant to buy that it’s just a coincidence? If you’ve read the book you’ll know it’s most likely the former, and kind of gets to the nub of Maggie’s issues, doing things for effect. If not, there’s little to bat away the whiff of plagiarism and lack of originality.

Later there’s a brilliantly cringeworthy scene as Maggie seductively channels Nico. It’s then sharply ruined as she cracks up laughing. You see, it’s not real, she’s deliberately doing an impression that she knows is naff. But her being in on the joke in the story kills the joke for the audience.

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Best friends forever? Izabella Cresci and Daisy Jacob as the teenage Birdy and Maggie (Photo: BBC)

Maggie’s moments of knowingness are shown to be a blessing and a curse in her adventures about town, but for us, it can get a bit wearying, like watching a facsimile of a facsimile. Not as witty, not as original, not as charming, not as pretend real that the medium demands.

Except that “pretend real” is an accurate description of that time of your life, where imaginary projected adulthood meets the genuine thing, and knowledge without experience shifts into realising you don’t actually know much at all. And the real story here, when it emerges, is an original one and worth telling. The ache of lost friendship can be just as heartbreaking and destructive as any romantic involvement, in some cases more so.

After Birdy goes on her first date, her “date mitzvah”, her path shifts, and the co-dependency of the two friends is exposed. As someone whose two best friends hooked up at university, it can be a painful journey to self-reliance, but perhaps a necessary one. That none of this though is readily apparent in the opening episode, may prevent further exploration, instead relegating it to the status of a Sex and the City clone. In that respect it’s a failure, the genius of the original being I’m sure its relatability to other groups of women, but also the fascinating insight provided into that world. Where the book does provide more of a balance, the series skews one way, leaving this middle-aged man feeling… well, I don’t know.