Evocative and immaculate: Netflix’s One Day reviewed

One Day is a bestselling novel with a simple but effective premise: a delightful, made-for-each-other couple meet on their last day at university, narrowly miss getting off with one another, then continue narrowly to miss getting off with one another every year for 14 years until finally, eventually they do.

Actually, I’m not sure about the pay off. I never got round to reading David Nicholls’s book, nor did I catch the poorly received movie version with Anne Hathaway playing the love interest. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed and shall be very disappointed if the dénouement doesn’t deliver what the plot seems to be promising. All right, so the episodes – each set, as in the book, on the same date in successive years – are only half an hour long. But that still makes seven hours of viewing wasted if it all turns pear-shaped. (The sub-editor has informed me that I will be disappointed.)

I’m currently half-way through and so far, so good. The casting is perfect, the settings – Edinburgh University, Rome, a Greek island, an agreeable house in Oxfordshire, a trendy early 1990s London restaurant – are evocative and immaculately realised; the tone and dialogue rarely strike a false note. My only reservation is that, at times, it feels like indulging in a too-delicious box of chocolates; binge-watching might prove emetic.

Our hero, the almost implausibly sweet, insufferably privileged and outrageously cute Dexter Mayhew is played by Leo Woodall. It’s a measure of how good Woodall is that I didn’t recognise him at all from the twinkly eyed, Essex-boy, Jack-the-lad catamite he played with equally persuasive brilliance in The White Lotus.

Sure, in the first few episodes, he’s only required to play genial eye-candy for the female viewer.