David J Black

News comes that the $238 billion Netflix Corporation of Los Gatos, California, has developed an interest in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket to the extent that it has submitted a planning application for a red plaque to celebrate the locality’s fictional association with a schlocky romantic series which most douce Edinburgh folk know nothing about. More specifically, it will mark the exact spot where the kenspeckle fictional hero of a production called One Day kissed his fictional heroine, so we aren’t talking reality here. The location selected is the foot of the Vennel steps, a bit of a crowded venue for the fictional tribe, given that the steps have been renamed after Muriel Spark’s Jean Brodie, who also had her romantic moments, if few in number, but didn’t actually exist.

Ah, romance! Your scrivener was yet a callow youth when he made a significant discovery about the opposite sex. There were the girls who read the D.C Thomson magazine Jackie, a rival of Bunty, and equivalent of US teen mag Seventeen, reputedly named after childrens’ author Jacqueline Wilson. They dreamt airily of meeting the sort of heroic god-like lad who would fall madly in love with them and stay with them forever. Then there were the girls who didn’t read Jackie, did their homework, made their way to university and went on to become lawyers, doctors, teachers, medieval historians, novelists, and tiger mums. 

One perfectly nice Jackie girl I happened to be acquainted with as a friend of her parents was good enough to lend me a copy of the said magazine after she caught me flicking through it. I took it home and began to study it closely much as, at more serious moments, I would sift through The Guardian women’s section in a desperate attempt to understand feisty middle class females who’d left the pony club behind and started toying with feminism – such a waste of time that turned out to be.

One illustrated Jackie storyline I’d found darkly intriguing. The heroine had met her Mr Darcy – though I think he had a name like Wayne – and they’d taken to each other like a binary superglue. It was true, passionate love, and they would definitely be spending the rest of their blissful lives together. Then came disaster. Wayne (let’s just call him that; she can be Tracy) had asked Tracy’s friend to pass on a message to her. Unfortunately the mendacious shrew masquerading as her pal had designs of her own on the deeply gorgeous lad, and deliberately failed to pass the message on. 

Wayne had faithfully turned up to meet Tracy at their favourite bench in the pedestrian precinct, and sat patiently, his heart a-flutter with love. Naturally, since her wicked friend hadn’t passed on the message, she failed to put in an appearance. The poor lad was so crestfallen that he’d just waited and waited and waited, until darkness fell, and then, what do you know, he was found dead on the bench the following morning, the cruelly abandoned victim of a broken heart. As Oscar Wilde so wisely said, anyone who did not laugh at the death of Little Nell must have had a heart of stone. I fear that was very much my response at the tragic passing of Wayne. In stark contrast the nice girl who’d lent me her magazine had passed an entire hour in floods of tears, she assured me.

These long ago memories of the malign influence of Jackie were long forgotten until one day (both of these words are portentous, by the way) I left my Edinburgh flat to take the air. On opening the stair door, I found myself confronted by arc lights and, as blinded as any prisoner who’d stepped into the sunlight after 20 years in a cellar, I stumbled forward towards the street and almost collided with American superstar Anne Hathaway. She gave a kind of actressy squeal, and an irritated voice from somewhere beyond the blazing arc lights shouted “CUT”. 

Well, nobody had told me they were going to be filming a critical and emotionally-loaded scene for One Day right outside my front door. There were camera crews, dollies, and lighting gantries all over the city in those days, which could be a bit of a problem. I would later move to the tourist hell of the Old Town, and one night found several large vehicles charging some machine to keep the lights blazing for Avengers: Infinity Wars right outside my window. There were also several special-effects explosions in the vicinity of St Giles. Obviously some sort of evasive action was necessary. 

At the Avengers production office a very nice girl agreed to make arrangements to transfer me to a hotel for the next three or four days. Unfortunately it wouldn’t be my hotel of choice, namely swanky Prestonfield House, since Ms Johansson’s people had block-booked the place. I ended up in a fairly basic tourist joint, sans breakfast, though it did have a shoe polishing machine as well as a person who made the bed, hung the towels up, and removed the dirty coffee cups.

To return to the vexed subject of One Day I had no intention of pursuing any interest in Ms Hathaway’s movie until some years later when I came across the DVD for a few pennies in a thrift shop. Impulse buys are never a good idea, but on this occasion I felt it justified since they’d been filming the local Georgian architecture, for which I had a professional fondness, and for all I knew they might have retained my walk-on scene with Anne Hathaway as a sort of quirky Fellini thing. Sadly, I was to be disappointed in this, which was annoying, since I’d been planning to send them an invoice by way of appearance fee.

Anyway, I had a stab at watching the movie which, despite the added interest of Ken Stott, an old friend, time-machined me right back to the mind-sapping drivel of Jackie. One Day was based on a book by an alumnus of Bristol University, David Nicholls, who for some reason chose Edinburgh as the graduation location of two deeply annoying lead characters who ended up having a celebratory grad-clutch (or certainly that snog in the Grassmarket)) which would set in place a run of anniversary re-unions so that on that same day for endless years they would meet up to compare notes about their ongoing life experiences.

The annoying thing about posh boy Dexter, in particular, was that he was exactly the sort of self-obsessed Hooray-Henry who raises the hackles of those who have to put up with such types in Edinburgh. Avoiding their bellowing presence in public spaces is a necessary survival skill around the George Square campus, which such folk perpetually infest – though on an individual level, it must be admitted, they can be perfectly pleasant. Dexter’s brief love interest, Emma, a flat-voweled lass from the demotic provinces who had an actual interest in her studies, was a slightly more sympathetic character. Even so, it was hard to comprehend the unutterable folly of surrendering herself to the preening poltroon who did the sort of thing to her which would never be directly referred to in Jackie, a tortuous journal of innocuous heavy petting.   

For reasons beyond human understanding, the simpering One Day became a best seller, making a mint for its author who scooped honorary D.Litt degrees from Edinburgh and Bristol Universities. One should never blame an honest scribbler, of course, just the industry that pushes his soppy rom-com inanities onto those in need of an emotional emetic. In the Hathaway mawkish soma trip, as I recall, she dies horribly under the wheels of a refuse lorry while cycling, a magic moment in an otherwise turgid movie which almost had me whooping with glee, cynic that I am.

That disposes of the worst film ever made. Next stop – the best film never made. One should always take a rounded view, don’t you think?