A hit is porn

Every day I go through what athletes call warm-up and warm-down, except that mine are mental rather than physical.

I warm up by doing newspaper puzzles, and in the evening I warm down by watching some TV series. Presence of sex scenes, ideally gratuitous, can move a show to the top of my choices, and I know Fr Michael would disapprove.

I divulge this information to forestall suggestions that I reject films simply because of their depictions of graphic sex. I don’t.

I do reject erotic films pretending to convey a serious message, whereas their real purpose is to attract viewers by titillating their naughty bits. This brings me to the current BBC hit Normal People.

It traces the story of two young lovers, Marianne and Connell, who first hook up at school somewhere in Ireland when both are 18. By the final episode they’re 23-year-olds who have been through Trinity College, Dublin.

Their relationship is on-off: sometimes Marianne is on Connell, sometimes she’s off and he’s on her. In some episodes their nude lovemaking takes up over half the total footage, leaving this viewer wondering why good celluloid was wasted on the other half.

Yet according to most reviewers, the other half is what makes the effort so worthwhile. Marianne and Connell aren’t merely two youngsters intermittently rutting away, and the series isn’t just soft porn. It’s a distillation of the present generation, the millennials.

If so, this generation is dishonest, neurotic, tasteless, ignorant, immoral and stupid. It is, however, undeniably woke, which reviewers regard as a redeeming feature.

They praise the series for its sensitive treatment of consent and mental ‘issues’, which is the millennial for ‘illness’. I wasn’t aware that consent to sex was a wide-reaching existential problem, but then I’m behind the times.

When they are still at school, Connell is peer-pressured into keeping his relationship with Marianne secret. He’s a popular athlete, while she’s regarded as ugly and unworthy of him.

That’s where dishonesty starts, for no effort was made to make Daisy Edgar-Jones look any less pretty than she is. Casting a plainer actress would have strengthened the story, but weakened the soft port aspect of it. And that’s where the money is.

Since consent now tops the Decalogue in the commandments sweepstakes, Connell has to deflower Marianne in compliance with the strictest requirements. Hence just before penetration, or possibly even during it (the camera angle isn’t definitive), he keeps reassuring Marianne that they could stop at any moment.

Well, 18-year-olds are certainly different from what I distantly remember. In the old days, it would have taken a crowbar to prise a boy that age from a naked supine girl. But back then we were unaware of the existential value of consent, nor indeed of its cosmically broad definition.

Both protagonists, especially at first Marianne, are supposed to be exceptionally bright. Yet in my experience, intelligent people tend to say and do intelligent things.

Marianne, however, says nothing clever and acts in an erratic manner. And Connell at first comes across as borderline retarded. Where Marianne is truculent, he is taciturn – and not just the clichéd strong and silent type.

As Connell explains, he can’t express his thoughts in words. That’s not known as a sign of dazzling intelligence, especially in a chap who, like Connell, is a budding writer.

I’ve met many writers in my life, some of them more talented and indeed more intelligent than others. Yet I’ve never met a tongue-tied one. An aspiring writer who can’t put his thoughts into words is like a budding Formula 1 driver who can’t get a driving licence.

Anyway, having had countless clandestine trysts with Marianne, Connell then takes another girl, one more befitting his public image, to a school dance, leaving Marianne home alone and lachrymose.

Again this doesn’t ring true. By now we know Connell loves Marianne. Also, the girl scrubs up well: even though she wasn’t an ugly duckling to begin with, now that her inner sensual self has come out, she wears revealing jumpers and looks gorgeous.

No man would be ashamed to be seen with her, yet Connell commits an unwarranted act of unspeakable cruelty. No wonder Marianne ignores his protestations of love and stops taking his weepy phone calls.

Cut to them meeting at Trinity a year or two later, having been out of touch in the interim. Both have other lovers, and Marianne is now presented as a beautiful, popular girl – although her appearance hasn’t changed one iota since school.

Before long, they ditch their current paramours and resume the rutting, with Marianne spending most of the screen time stark naked. Sorry, I’ve misrepresented the situation.

Both of them are stark naked, which Miss Edgar-Jones highlighted in an interview as a blow for ‘gender equality’. When we were both topless, she explained, gender equality suffered because, when both sexes expose their torsos, the woman actually exposes more, existentially speaking.

However, when they were both starkers, equality was served. Here, as a lifelong champion of gender equality, I beg to differ. For a man’s primary sex characteristics are more visible than a woman’s.

In one shot we actually catch a glimpse of Connell’s, mercifully flaccid, penis. To match that on equal terms, Marianne should have faced the camera with her legs open. Yet the grateful audience was spared that delight.

For some negligently unexplained reason the two drift apart again, with Marianne passing like a relay baton from one lover to another. She is shown enjoying a full alphabet of sexual variants, S&M, B&D, you name it. Yet her heart isn’t in it because she never stops loving Connell.

Why not spare herself all that humiliation and stay with Connell in the first place? The show regards such questions as superfluous and tactless.

Connell, meantime, goes to pieces – partly because he loves Marianne who’s doing S&M with someone else, and partly because his school friend killed himself. Why, we aren’t told because it’s none of our business.

The suicide affects Connell deeply even though he hasn’t seen the lad for three years. He goes off the rails and ends up in free counselling. That’s where the sensitive treatment of mental ‘issues’ comes in.

The shrink mouths the usual banalities and asks the usual questions, along the lines of “How does that make you feel?” Connell provides a vivid answer by throwing a hysterical fit, something he managed to do well enough even without professional help.

The moral of that sensitive episode is that, rather than keeping one’s ‘issues’ inside, it’s much better to let it all hang out. Yet such emotional incontinence doesn’t do Connell much good, by the looks of it.

Round and round she goes. Marianne follows her abusive lovers to Italy, Sweden and back to Ireland, with Connell chasing her, or her chasing him, with varying persistence.

Each rutting get-together is followed by a breakup for no good reason. One gets the impression that, now unable to satisfy her masochistic cravings physically (Connell is rather orthodox in that department), Marianne seeks to satisfy them through mental anguish.

That said, the two actors are good, Marianne is lovely, Connell looks like a dead ringer for the ManU defender Harry Maguire, and the location sequences are shot well.

The show is reasonably entertaining – shame about the story, character development, believability and especially emetic messages. Soft porn should be served neat.