One Day, Tracy Chapman and why we're obsessed with looking back

Are we nostalgic for then, or just not very keen on now?

It started with Tracy Chapman. 

In fact, I could stop right there because in many ways, for me, it began and ended with her. Fast Car has been “our song” since we first met in the late 80s. A song that instantly projects me back to those early heady days of meeting “the one”. Broke, professionally aimless, scooting from one rented shoebox and half a fridge shelf in a stranger’s flat to another. Then I fell in love with J, got a secretarial temp job in a magazine office and refused to leave, and suddenly everything clicked into place. 

But that’s not what I’m talking about here, what I’m talking about here is the wave of nostalgia that seems to have subsumed almost everyone I know in the last few months. And that, too, feels like it started with Tracy Chapman. Or perhaps with Luke Combs reminding us of the genius of Chapman’s Fast Car. My earworm has been playing it on repeat ever since she became the first black songwriter to win Song of the Year at the Country Music Awards back in November (35 years after it debuted). And it reached fever pitch a couple of weeks ago with Chapman and Combs’ iconic (genuinely) Grammys performance. 

I think that’s also, in large part, why we’re so besotted with One Day, riding high at number one in the Netflix charts and with David Nicholls’ book back in the top ten, 15 years after it was last a bestseller. Yes, the casting is phenomenal – Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod will be forever Dex and Emma for the rest of their lives to whole generations. Yes, the script is spot on – just spiky enough, just cheesy enough and, crucially, with not a single whiff of the 21st century about it. Yes, the pacing is fantastic – fourteen 30-minute episodes! Which genius came up with that? And the locations… well, team One Day, you did my beloved Edinburgh proud. (Even if, you know, you really can’t get to The Vennel (below) in under a minute from the New Town, however fast you run!)

Yes, it’s all those things. But what it’s really about is nostalgia.

It’s about landlines and phone boxes and answering machines and sitting on the stairs waiting for calls that never come and making calls that never get answered. (I saw someone on Twitter/X/whatever saying in appalled fascination, “what did THEY do back then? Give out their parents phone number and wait for them to call?!” Yes. Yes, that is precisely what we did.)