I was sucked into the new Netflix adaptation of One Day in the first episode, grabbing the remote to pause it as Dexter sits on Emma’s bed after their first night together. “Look,” I said to my husband. “It’s our duvet cover.” It’s blue, with thin strips of bright colour, and I still have it, though it has faded and has lost its poppers. I think it came from Habitat back in the day, when Habitat was an aspirational shop with branches in provincial towns, not a subcategory of the Argos website.
Is “back in the day” the main draw of One Day, which focuses on a star-crossed couple on a single day each year of their relationship, from 1988 into the early 00s? No shade intended: it is delightful telly, the cast are great and the conceit is – always was – brilliant. But the reason gen Xers like me are watching with such rapt intensity isn’t the love story so much as the precision period detail, impeccably evolving year to year.
The details hit with such force: Emma’s polka-dot and tulle graduation party dress in episode one (my go-to combo for school discos), and the white, cylindrical Fairy Liquid bottle in the kitchen in episode 7. People of my vintage were similarly delighted by the pinboard full of gig tickets, flyers and photos, “new” mango chilli Kettle Chips, and tracks by N-Joi and Frankie Knuckles (the whole soundtrack is a perfect portal to our past).
But it is also unnerving to see the 80s and 90s firmly placed in the realm of costume drama. Watching Ambika Mod (born 1995) as Emma rummaging around to “put on a cassette” or Leo Woodall (born 1996) as Dexter feeding coins into a payphone, it feels that it surely must be almost as alien for them as wearing a crinoline or riding in a phaeton. Woodall can’t know that very particular smell that payphones had. (What was it? No, not pee, but maybe the disinfectant they used on the mouthpiece?) Mod has never recorded the Top 40, dodging every second of Bruno Brookes talking, on a double tape deck.
Plus, it is clearly so meticulously researched, and wisely. In a Jane Austen adaptation, only a few experts will spot anachronisms; here, a whole generation will shout at you online if your character is smoking the wrong brand of fags. I found myself imagining researchers poring over copies of the Face and watching The Word with as much intensity as they would study reticules and cravats at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
We are history. That’s the pain – the algia bit – of nostalgia, but it is an enjoyable ache. It is part of the story behind the recent commissioning and success of 80s, and now 90s, content: Stranger Things, the Wham documentary, The Newsreader and The Greatest Night in Pop (recounting the making of We Are the World in 1985).
The other part, though, is younger viewers relishing the immaculate evocation of an era that feels and looks distant (see also the recent gen Z enthusiasm for Friends, Gilmore Girls and other 90s series): we are their Mad Men.
And the thing is, they are right. It was a long time ago. I sometimes work in the Observer magazine archives, and copies from the 80s and 90s look and feel old: yellowing pages and attitudes. Chitra Ramaswamy highlighted the exception to One Day’s period accuracy in her review: “White boys like Dex didn’t fancy brown girls like Em … Dex (and his parents) would have made unintentionally racist blunders.” (“People were confounded by coriander, FFS,” as a friend put it). Mod is wonderful, it’s inspired casting, but it lets us look misty-eyed at our past without reminders of the casual racism that accompanied the Saxone pixie boots, unlike It’s a Sin, in which pervasive homophobia is at the heart of the story.
Anyway, my peers aren’t swooning over burger phones and S’Express because they think things were better back then. The real appeal is that we were better – brighter, less baggy, like my duvet cover. And that’s why I suspect we will keep falling for near-past nostalgia TV: who could resist that?
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
