young women had otherwise been told were silly or frothy
or unimportant: the abandonment of your great mate
getting a new boyfriend, the heartbreak of being ghosted by
someone you met on the internet, the existential panic
when you realise that life is just “f ***ing Tottenham Court
Road and ordering shit off Amazon”. It was deeply reas-
suring in a period when reassurance is all you need, when it
feels like everything is a bit of a mess, when it feels like you
are getting it all wrong somehow. Mostly though, it was a
thrill to read about the ecstasy and intimacy of female
friendship, put on an equal footing with romantic love.
The show, written and executive-produced by Alderton,
is based around Maggie — the Dolly character in the
book — and her three mates, who move into their
first grown-up flat together in Camden a decade too late
for the area’s Britpop coolness. They drink cheap wine
from the offie, make up dance routines using a dehumidi-
fier as a wind machine, go to sticky-floored nightclubs
where there’s a kebab spinning in the corner, and roll
down the hill at Hampstead Heath as the sun comes up,
simply because they can.
“Female friendship is really quite magical,” Appleton
says. “And we were all living it on set.” She met her
on-screen best friends Bel Powley, Marli Siu and Aliyah
Odoffin during rehearsal week and they have been insepa-
rable since. “Once we started chatting, they couldn’t stop
us. We went out for dinners, all living in the same apart-
ment block when we were filming [in Manchester]. One
night we were, like, how ridiculous would it be if we got a
limo to our wrap party? And we all looked at each other
and said, ‘We’re going to get a limo to our wrap party,
aren’t we?’ It was the gaudiest prom-style limo, lots of UV
lighting, but we thought we were hilarious.”
In one scene Maggie pretends to a boy she fancies that
she has been at a party in east London, when really she has
been drinking wine in her living room alone, getting ready
to “casually” drop past his house on her “way home”.
“Dolly’s writing made us feel like we were all doing all
those cringey things we thought no one else was doing atthe time,” Appleton says. “Thank goodness! In my twenties
I would change myself for someone to like me more. With
boyfriends I was very much like” — she puts on a meek and
mild voice — “ ‘I’ll do whatever you wanna do.’ That sense
of self has developed so much in the past five years for me.
Now I know that it’s not all about giving everything over to
someone else.” She says she’s in a “really happy, healthy
relationship” now, but that’s all I’m getting.
Has she ever internet-dated? Alderton was the dating
columnist for this magazine for many years and online
dating features heavily in the show. “I did very briefly.
There’s something hilarious and cringey about what
people choose to put on their profile, so I was basically
taking the piss out of one of my friend’s Hinge accounts
and she said, ‘Why don’t you set one up, then?’ So I was
like, ‘You know what, fine, I will!’ I did it for about two
weeks but I didn’t like it, the catalogue of people.”
Dating apps have certainly “shortened the attention
span” of our generation, she continues. “You get a new shiny
BBC, Getty Images person, you date them for a few weeks, then you start seeing
Left Dolly Alderton
at the National
Book awards, 2018.
Far left Appleton
as Maggie in the
BBC adaptation
of Everything I
Know About Love.
Below Appleton
with, from left,
Marli Siu (Nell), Bel
Powley (Birdy) and
Aliyah Odoffin
(Amara) in the showThe Sunday Times Style • 15