The New Normal:Normal People.

"Looks good, fine to me. I'm in love with my very best friend" - Sunspots, Julian Cope.

"You're acting like you've never been kissed before" - Connell.
"I haven't" - Marianne.

BBC3's Normal People was an emotionally powerful, realistic, and obscenely touching meditation on star-crossed love, on growing up, on finding one's place in society, and on the quest to find a place both in the world and in someone you love and care about's heart. You'll not be surprised to read that I cried many times during its twelve half-hour episodes

Tears of joy as well as tears of sadness. Many people whose judgement I value had been raving about the show, and all the sex and nudity in it, for a while and I even feared that with such warm praise and high expectations I'd be disappointed.

I was anything but. The drama hinges around the complex will they/won't they/will they again/won't they again relationship between Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal) as we follow them from school in Sligo to university in Dublin and, as the series progresses, around various scenic locations in Europe.

Marianne is a 'spirited' and smart teenager who shuns even the few friendships she's offered at school and is on the end of constant, merciless bullying. Things are equally problematic at home in the big house she shares with her cold mother Denise (Aislin McGuckin) and her toxic brother Alan (Frank Blake).

Their cleaner Lorraine (Sarah Greene, looking far too young to be playing the mother of a teenager) and her son Connell are regular visitors and though we see lingering glances between Connell and Marianne they seem, initially, poles apart. She reads books and has no friends, he excels at Gaelic football and appears to be the most popular boy at school with his choice of the girls.

But it's Marianne he has a soft spot for and she for him. Connell's stillness soon reveals its depth. What he lacks in confidence he makes up for in spades with his compassion, his keen intelligence, and his moral fibre. It may seem odd to see a boy in his school uniform driving a car and drinking down the pub (and one of his schoolmates has even got crow's feet) but that doesn't ruin a brilliant capturing of what that all encompassing first flush of lust and young love, all love, feels like.

Directors Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie MacDonald give you a hugely realistic picture of that exciting stage of life when the future opens up in front of you in a wide vista of fears, anxieties, and possibilities. The early stages of a relationship when it's almost impossible to keep your hands off each other, when you can't stop looking at each other, when you can't stop thinking about each other.

These days I am an observer of love rather than a participant, I stand outside the perimeter fence of that territory like some cheapskate who doesn't want to pay to go to a firework display, but I still remember how love felt. I've not gone completely sour. I still love the idea of love, I still love lovers, and I still love love.

It's still painful watching people who have the keys to unlock each other's happiness instead putting each other through such pain and heartache, pushing at the boundaries of love until something has to give. The first kiss, the first drunken 'I love you', the first break up, the first make up, the tears that roll down their cheeks, the looks in their faces. It all feels so very real.

As do the often, for TV, quite explicit sex scenes (well you get to see a cock and a bush as well as Edgar-Jones's tits on multiple occasions). When Connell and Marianne fuck each other, just as when they kiss each other, it never feels pornographic. It feels intrusive that we should be sharing these intimate moments with them and that's as it should be. It gives the scenes an honesty so often lacking when directors, instead, plump for cheap titillation.

As the action moves to Dublin we see Connell struggle to fit in in a very different, pseudo-intellectual, environment while Marianne, for the first time in her life, thrives. Marianne falls into other relationships, makes friends with Peggy and Joanna (the excellent India Mullen and Eliot Salt) and moves into (another) big house with them, where they sit drinking coffee and wine and putting the world to right.

Connell moves in to a more down-at-heel pad with his new friend Niall (Desmond Eastwood) and his natural conciliatory nature is put to the test in the cut and thrust of academic debating societies. On trips home Marianne is free to study while Connell works long shifts in a mundanely familiar garage. Meetings with his old friend Rob (Eanna Hardwick) show just how disparate the paths their lives have taken have become.

A night in the pub when Rob wants to carry on drinking but Connell has to head home to focus on other priorities illustrated perfectly that moment when one person really wants to get on the piss and drown all their problems while another has better stuff going on but is too sympathetic and kind to show it.

It made me think about my own friendships and relationships and which ones have been strengthened and consolidated (and which ones haven't) during this extraordinary time we're living through. I thought not just of friendships and relationships but how they so strongly affect the direction of our lives and how we cope with what life throws at us. I know, almost for certain, that without a few deeply felt emotional bonds to some very special people, I'd be struggling during this lockdown period instead of (almost) thriving.

In Dublin, Connell works as a waiter while Marianne has sex with her new boyfriend and, in this, Normal People is not shy on touching on issues of class, entitlement, and privilege. When we first leave our home towns for big cities or to go to college we often meet people from vastly different backgrounds to our own and Normal People, with this as with so much else, manages to convey how  that experience feels both precisely and beautifully.

It's not a perfect series. There are too many coincidences and neatly tied up plot lines, it sometimes hews too close to the cliched narrative that the humble small town dweller can teach the urban sophisticate good old fashioned common sense, and the soundtrack (Yazoo's great Don't Go aside) is too full of wishy-washy Nouvelle Vague acoustic drivel to really ring true.

Tuscany is, of course, cypress trees, sumptuous feasts, and large mansions while Sweden's never seen without a coating of snow and a soundtrack of Nordic pop. But these are minor quibbles. Normal People tackles rootlessness versus rootedness with gentle aplomb, it makes subtle points about how men often control relationship narratives while women, even headstrong independent women, and their wants and needs are regularly yoked to the plough of male sexual desires and fantasies.

It shows how people's pasts, Marianne's father abused her mother, map out their futures. Feint surface scars of past traumas can be prised open again by chance meetings and it's painful to watch people you've grown to like mistaking abuse for love. When Normal People looks at loss, alcoholism, depression, guilt, Gaelic football, and the bargaining we all must make between happiness and success it is at its most glorious.

When we witness a lingering glance between Marianne and Connell we know that extra second of camera time represents days, weeks, months, and years of longing. Every player in this series was brilliant (shout outs to Aoife Hinds as Helen Brophy, Frank Blake, Eliot Salt, Sarah Greene, and Desmond Eastwood for doing so well with relatively little screen time) as was Sally Rooney's writing and Abrahamson and MacDonald's direction but the highest praise must go to Edgar-Jones and Mescal who absolutely dominate the drama from the first second of episode one to the last second of episode twelve.

They are totally, utterly, believable three dimensional people who often frustrate us as much as they fascinate and enchant us. You genuinely can't wait to find out what will happen next in their life and, as such, it's no surprise that so many people boast of, or confess to, binge watching it. When Julian Cope sang about falling in love with his 'very best friend' he made it sound idyllic. The truth, of course, is far more complicated. But that's not to say it's any less magical.