Not many good things came out of the pandemic, but Paul Mescal was one of them. Cast your mind back, if you can bear it, to April 2020: lockdown was a month-old concept, most of us were getting to grips with Zoom, and we were still nurturing hobbies and sourdough habits to stave off the lure of unchecked TV time.
Towards the end of the month, however, the BBC dumped all 12 episodes of Normal People on iPlayer. If it wasn’t the first binge-watching phenomenon of the pandemic era – that honour goes to Tiger King – it gave that stifled spring a rare flurry of youthful, hormonal pop excitement. And the young, sweet, sad-eyed Irishman in the lead had a lot to do with it.
