The sensational 2020 adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People cast a cold eye on youth and young love — but downplayed one fundamental aspect of life in your 20s.
Which is that, if negotiating young adulthood is melodramatic, it is also the best fun ever — a party that never ends until, suddenly, it has to (this is what is known as “your 30s”) And that sense of 20-something life as one ongoing lark is compellingly conjured in Everything I Know About Love (BBC One, Tuesday), based on Dolly Alderton’s memoir of the same name.
This is, at its core, a tale as old as time. Or, at least, a tale as old as This Life, Amy Jenkins’s 1990s series about trainee solicitors flat-sharing in London. On a train to the UK capital we are introduced to Maggie (Emma Appleton, whom nerds will recognise as Renfri from The Witcher), a 24-year-old with a trendy haircut and a penchant for afternoon G&Ts.
She catches the eye of a bad boy musician and Pete Doherty lookalike (Connor Finch) who claims, with a straight face, that his name is “Street” and who, you just know, will grow up to be the most tragic 45-year-old ever.
Thus begins a messy romance complicated by the fact Street doesn’t want her to meet any of his friends. Meanwhile, having just moved to Camden in London, Maggie and her pals are experiencing the cut and thrust of Millennial existence (the action kicks off in 2012). They’re permanently skint and yet life is essentially one never-ending karaoke evening, so what is there to complain about?
Alderton’s writing has been on the receiving end of a lot of critical sniffiness. However, her portrayal of female friendship is bang on, especially when Maggie’s wallflower bestie Birdy (Bel Powley) gets herself a boyfriend and Maggie doesn’t know how to respond (in her imagination she’s supposed to be the romantically successfully one).
Much of Everything I Know About Love is a blur, which is what life is like when you’ve left home and are living hand to mouth, and pub crawl to pub crawl with your first real grown-up friends (alongside Birdy, Maggie is shacked up with college chums played by Marli Siu) and Aliyah Odoffin). And watching you can’t help despairing that somebody hasn’t made an Irish equivalent, about a flat share in central Cork, Limerick or Dublin.
Alderton gets to the essence of young adulthood. It’s that one time in your grown-up life when you have permission to be silly and impetuous without coming across as tragic — and where the worst that can happen is you turn up for your cruddy minimum wage job with a hangover. It is sure to appeal to those with cherished memories of their own messy first steps into adulthood — and anyone for whom the manicured misery of Normal People didn’t quite ring true.
