You have to love the fairytale serendipity of that backstory: one chance encounter and a life is changed — but another kind feels increasingly common. While watching Normal People, I looked up Daisy Edgar-Jones and learned that she was the privately-educated daughter of a film editor and the former head of entertainment at Sky. Does that make her performance any less impressive? Not a jot. But it does make her a nepotism baby.

Back in February, a young Euphoria fan called Meriem Darradji tweeted: “Wait I just found out that the actress that plays Lexie is a nepotism baby omg [crying emoji]. Her mom is Leslie Mann and her dad is a movie director lol.” Darradji’s surprise was surprising. Apatow has a distinctive surname and five of her seven big-screen credits are in movies directed by her dad, so she’s hardly working undercover. Still, the phrase took off with TikTok users, who quickly improvised a taxonomy of nepotism — actors with wealthy, well-connected parents are less suspect than those with bona fide movie stars in the family for example. Some said how disappointing it was to click on the Wikipedia page of a hot young newcomer and see that their parents already had their own blue-linked entries, while others were enthralled by this Hollywood quasi-aristocracy.

Whether the phrase is contemptuous, affectionate or ambivalent depends on who’s using it but, as the softness of the word baby implies, the tone is usually more playful than angry. It’s an amusing way to interrogate privilege, inequality, the limits to social mobility and the promise of meritocracy. Nepotism, which entered English from the Italian in the 17th century, isn’t quite the right word for this phenomenon. It strictly means favouring one’s relatives with privileged positions, which is easy to achieve in business and politics but less so in an industry where employment is episodic and unpredictable. You couldn’t make Succession about a family of actors because there is no glittering prize to bestow on a favoured son or daughter. The advantages that second-generation celebrities enjoy are more nebulous. Connections, of course. A familiarity with how things work, from film sets to the paparazzi. And, let’s be honest, genes: beautiful people make beautiful people. (Exhibit A: Zoe Kravitz.)

No industry, therefore, has as many nepotism babies as modelling, where the likes of Lila Moss, Kaia Gerber, Iris Law and the Hadid siblings make the old tradition of scouts plucking gorgeous unknowns from provincial shopping centres seem quaint. Conversely, musical talent does not seem to be hereditary; very few major artists have famous parents. In fact, as Julian Lennon or Jakob Dylan will tell you, there is such violent suspicion of anyone seen to be trading on a famous surname that failure is more likely than not.

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The many failures of Ben Affleck

By Dorian Lynskey

Acting, a field in which looks and charisma go a long way but aren’t enough on their own, falls somewhere in between. Hollywood has always been a place where the American dream could seem like more than spin. As the title of his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, indicates, Kirk Douglas literally went from rags to riches. Marilyn Monroe grew up in foster homes and orphanages. “I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house,” she said. “When I heard that this was acting, I said that’s what I want to be. You can play.”

At the same time, it was an industry where dynasties mattered: the Barrymores, the Hustons, the Fondas. Liza Minnelli, Carrie Fisher, Jamie Lee Curtis and Isabella Rossellini all had at least one very famous parent. No doubt it is easier to get a break if you’re the child of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher but many of these celebrity scions felt anxiety about their privilege and how it was perceived. Nicolas Cage changed his surname from Coppola to avert suspicion of favouritism and begged interviewers not to mention the fact that his uncle directed The Godfather.

“I’m really a product of nepotism,” Jeff Bridges once told me. “I was literally carried onto a film set when I was six months old… Usually one of the hardest things is getting your foot in the door so that was kind of handled. But I had to prove to myself that I didn’t get the job because of whose son I was — that I had some real talent. It took a few years for me to say, oh, OK, I guess I have some value of my own.” Of course, Bridges went on to have a far more substantial career than both his father Lloyd, who is best remembered for the Airplane! movies, and his brother Beau, which suggests that ultimately it’s the work that counts. That takes time though.

It was a while before it became obvious that Ben Stiller or Michael Douglas were stars in their own right. “As the child of someone, you get access other people don’t have, so the playing field is not level in that way,” Gwyneth Paltrow (daughter of Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow) recently explained to model Hailey Bieber (daughter of Stephen Baldwin). “However, I really do feel that once your foot is in the door, which you unfairly got in, then you almost have to work twice as hard and be twice as good because people are ready to pull you down and say… ‘You are only there because of your dad or your mum.’” The phrasing is typically tone-deaf — are other actors half as good and working half as hard? — but Paltrow earned her place. Like Stiller and Bridges, she eclipsed her parents.

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Nepotism babies inspire ambivalence because most of them are clearly talented and apparently charming. A list of the most interesting young actors around would include Dakota Johnson, Margaret Qualley, John David Washington, Zoe Kravitz and Riley Keough. Even those whose unusually prestigious debuts would appear to scream nepotism — Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper in Licorice Pizza; James Gandolfini’s son Michael playing the young Tony Soprano in The Many Saints of Newark — garnered great reviews across the board.

Perhaps the only really glaring case of unearned familial privilege is Brooklyn Beckham, who is true celebrity royalty in the sense that he has nothing to offer except his bloodline. Fame is both his birthright and, in lieu of discernible talent, his job. The smart ones are honest about their advantages. “I think I’ll get a couple chances on their name and then if I suck, I’ll get kicked out of the kingdom,” Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) told People. “And that’s what should happen.”

This new fascination with nepotism reminds me of the fuss, a decade ago, about old Etonian or Harrovian actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne. They were obviously gifted, and nobody seriously believed that the headmaster of Eton could phone a movie director and secure a plum role as easily as a starter job in the City. Yet there were so many of them, all at once, that something smelled off. Individuals became lightning rods for a broader concern that the game — meaning society rather than Hollywood — was rigged.

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By Dorian Lynskey

That debate came in the wake of the financial crisis and the Occupy movement. Talk of nepotism babies coincides with another wave of economic anxiety and heightened awareness of inequality. Yet the conversation is for the most part refreshingly clear-eyed, curious and nuanced. It’s not the individual that matters; it’s the ecosystem. If there is still diversity of experience and opportunity, and most actors haven’t grown up in the industry, then a nepotism baby is an object of curiosity rather than a systemic problem. There is a healthy sense of perspective, too. As long as people like Eric Trump exist, one can’t get too het up about Maude Apatow.

I think that Bridges and Paltrow are right to suggest that Hollywood is not a meritocracy in the short term but becomes more so in the long term. Talent outlives good fortune. The perfect test case is Sofia Coppola, who experienced what you might call a nepotism baby do-over. After Winona Ryder dropped out of The Godfather Part III, Francis Ford Coppola cast 18-year-old Sofia as Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary. She bombed. On top of her lousy screen presence, the impression that the role was entirely undeserved inspired such brutal reviews that she gave up acting all together. “I didn’t realise how much pressure I would be under — people want to see Francis’s daughter fall on her face,” she told Entertainment Weekly. A decade later, though, she directed The Virgin Suicides, a debut so confident, distinctive and unbeholden to her father that she could start again. You can’t help noticing that all of her films have been about the privileged and unhappy.

Then, as if acting as warm-up man for the coming entreaclement of Luton Airport’s runway, the UK’s former energy and climate change minister, Sir John Hayes, went on Radio 4 to argue that all this fuss over a heatwave showed that “we’ve lost our sense of what’s normal”. (“I can remember the summer of 1975,” he declared, puzzling anyone who could remember the summer of 1976.) Three days later, his home county sent a four-wheeled gritter named Spreaddie Mercury to discharge itself over Lincolnshire roads liquefying at a record-breaking 56.3°C.

Then, just as I was about to finish this piece, Esquire magazine revealed that Chris Evans — the Knives Out one not the TFI Friday one — had been detected trying to “normalise” something. When you hear about things being normalised, it’s usually in reference to lying or racism or toxic masculinity, but thankfully Evans had just decided to go to the premiere of The Gray Man wearing a white vest under his suit jacket. “The normalisation of sexy, sexy menswear,” the mag confirmed, “has been coming for some time.”

At our moment in history, is the word “normal” exhausted beyond use? Is it time to retire it? We expect it to do so much. The normality of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, for example, resides in its characters’ struggles with mental illness; the novel argues for the ordinariness and ubiquity of experiences that fiction might once have treated as exceptional. It’s not the same normal as Planet Normal, the Daily Telegraph podcast that offers views on Covid policy that are not broadly shared by either the public or the scientific community. So what, if anything, does it now mean?

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Could you spot a conspiracy theorist?

By Matthew Sweet

These are questions for Sarah Chaney, research fellow at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, which in recent years has produced exciting work on British weeping, shame in early modern Spain, and Busman’s stomach (a psychosomatic disorder that troubled double-decker drivers around the time of the 1937 Coronation). Chaney’s new book, Am I Normal? takes a single term and, like a long, chatty entry from Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords (1976), traces its sources and explores the different uses to which it has been put.

Her first lesson about “normal” as we understand it today is that its history is short. In essence, her book is an account of an escape. In 1800, “normal” was a mathematical term designating a straight line perpendicular to the tangent. But in 1840, along came Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer and statistician who loosed the term into the space of a new discipline he called “social physics”. (Auguste Comte had thought of it first, but coined another word — “sociology” — to ensure nobody confused their work.) Taking data on the chest measurements of 5,738 Scottish soldiers from a two-decades-old copy of the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Quetelet plotted these numbers on a graph to produce an average chest size, rather as astronomers used multiple readings to establish the length of a planetary orbit. As revolution brought chaos and disruption to Belgium, Quetelet found that on paper, all measurable human qualities — from height and weight to propensity for suicide — fell into the quiet and simple order of the bell curve. We still call this “normal distribution”.

Quetelet knew that his calculations were not offering a simple description of reality. The average soldier who emerged from his numbers did not exist. Not all who followed in his footsteps were so clear-sighted. As Todd Rose relates in The End of Average, the spectral figure of the average man led US Air Force designers to produce a generation of jet planes with cockpits that fitted nobody. (It’s also why nuclear families are easier to find in adverts than censuses.)

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There’s another story here that’s just as big. Chaney spells out the problem with the data itself: it shows an enormous bias towards white middle-class individuals, who comprise less than 12% of the world’s population, but make up 80% of subjects in medical studies and 96% of subjects in psychological ones. The normal isn’t just a phantom; it’s one raised from the experience of a minority. Yet it is used to create standards for a world in which everyone must live.

Quetelet’s work generated a universe of good and ghastly work based on averages — the Body Mass Index, typologies of criminals, Florence Nightingale’s hospital reforms, John Snow’s discovery of the waterborne nature of cholera, the IQ test, the Kinsey Report into the sex habits of Americans, eugenic projects from Francis Galton to the Nazis.

Amazingly, Am I Normal? suggests that the data didn’t even have to be real in order to have an impact. For instance, statistics about the poor physical state of British recruits to the Anglo-Boer War are often credited for starting the process that gave us the 1904 Committee on Physical Deterioration, free school milk and — eventually — the National Health Service. The numbers are scary. 8,000 of the 11,000 men who volunteered in Manchester, it was said, were unfit to serve. Chaney uses a 2008 paper by the medical historian Vanessa Heggie to show that this figure has no source but the rambling polemics of Arnold White, a failed Liberal parliamentary candidate with a thing for antisemitic conspiracy theories. (“When we survey other nations,” he wrote in Efficiency and Empire (1901), we “perceive how weakness, self-indulgence, want of foresight, self-respect, culture and industry are enabling astute, industrious, or unscrupulous Jews to destroy the power of whole classes.”) A culture convinced of its own declining state did not ask for White’s receipts. It had a picture of itself that matched its prejudices.

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But Chaney’s work also yields a warning about making the same kind of mistake about the past. In one of her chapters, she uses the brutal practice of the clitoridectomy to illustrate how 19th-century medicine attempted to regulate female sexuality. The operation, she argues, was “a cure for sexual desire” that “acquired a dubious reputation after the discrediting of its main advocate, gynaecologist Isaac Baker Brown, in 1867”. She is not the first to use Brown to tell a story about normality imposed by a surgical blade — but I’m not sure whether the facts really serve her thesis.

Scandal erupted around Brown when it was revealed that he had been operating on patients without consent. The subsequent inquiry also allowed his peers to pass judgement on the procedure itself. They used words such as “barbarous”, “quackery” and “terrorism”. I can find only one example of an English doctor other than Baker who ever carried out it out. It was the opposite of normal. It was shockingly extreme.

Moreover, the case that brought Brown down was not the one that we might naturally imagine – a Victorian wife punished for her desires. The central figure in the affair, Mary Hancock, suffered from severe bouts of mental illness. She saved pus from her blisters in a gallipot, believed that she was turning into a crystal, imagined that she was Princess Charlotte of Wales, who had died in childbirth in 1817. Her doctors were concerned about what they perceived as a manic sexual energy, but marriage, not mutilation, seems to have been their preferred cure.

All this became a matter for the courts only when her husband, Robert Peaty, fought, unsuccessfully, to save her from the machinations of her family, who wanted to annul the marriage for financial gain. As the astonished press coverage indicates, there was nothing normal about any of this (except, perhaps, the punishment meted out to the doctor who cut Mary Hancock with steel scissors of his own design). A misplaced scholarly tradition of seeing the clitoridectomy as an exemplar of Victorian cruelty may be the only reason that Chaney implies otherwise.

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The dangers of the Nobel Prize

By Stuart Ritchie

Ironically, Am I Normal? is just the sort of book that might save a researcher from error. Its pages are full of implied warnings against the unquestioning use of data, particularly when it fits preconceived ideas too neatly. But as Raymond Williams reminds us, this is hazardous work. Many of the entries in Keywords begin by saying that the term under discussion is “one of the most difficult words in the language”. “Normal” is not on his list. But, as Chaney demonstrates, it merits the same careful handling. It’s a word that imposes a false picture of the world and may sometimes cause us much pain. But it’s one for which we’re grateful when we’re trying to work out how many Paracetamol to take, or how to read a red hot weather forecast.

A few weeks ago, a clip of the scruffy CBBC personality Hacker T. Dog went viral. It was a short moment from a 2016 TV show in which he made a strange emphatic statement to his co-presenter, Lauren Layfield. “We’re normal men!” he declared. “We’re just innocent men.” Layfield, her face close to his snout, dissolved into incapable laughter.

Hacker is a little glove puppet with button eyes, but this was probably a more intelligent and sensible deployment of the word “normal” than the examples at the beginning of this piece. It demonstrated its meaninglessness and its power. It showed how a young and promiscuous concept has exerted such a powerful influence on our lives — despite being fragile to the point of absurdity.

Yet how dull “the literary phenomenon of the decade” turned out to be — and what was stranger, how knowingly, coyly dull. I had assumed the almost insolently underwhelming name on the tin — Normal People — was an ironic joke, and that the contents would be abnormally original, with unusually vivacious, insightful writing.

I was wrong. Rooney isn’t into vivacity, as her dour expression and flat, understated style of writing might suggest. What she is into is sex, and most particularly the tears and apologies that seem to surround it for the young erotic adventurers of today. The result is a prose I found hypnotically low-pulse.

But with over a million copies sold worldwide, first prize in the Costa and Waterstones Book of the Year and plenty more accolades, Normal People clearly answered to a global appetite. The TV adaptation was inevitable, and lo, it was released last week to instant roaring success.

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Once again, a dutiful investigator, I found myself glued to the BBC’s version of Rooney’s coolly flat world while also bored. What is it about this story that has captured us so?

Most obviously, it is the sex, which manages to be both ‘hot’ and firmly didactic — just how we moderns like it. Most episodes — and there are 12 — contain what can only be described as great coitus between the lead characters, with emotional intensity driving on the obvious physical urgency and pleasure. At first, in school, the popular Connell (Paul Mescal) is too embarrassed to be associated with the weird and friendless Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones), and so their sexual relationship is secret. Though Rooney and now the directors work hard, and successfully, to render this relationship tense and meaningful, they obviously have a keen eye for the plainly arousing.

There is something unsettling, almost dishonest in this. Packaged as the sometimes difficult, vulnerable-making and above all authentic sexual experience of ‘normal people’ (i.e. ‘damaged’ people, of which more later) these are not the kind of sexual experiences I remember from school and university — and there were plenty of ‘normal’ (i.e. ‘damaged’) people in both places. In the first place, their looks and the calibre of their sensual experience for their age are exceptional.

Readers of the book had to infer from Connell’s thoughts that Marianne is in the essentially sexy category of unpopular girl, despite being bullied about her looks at school. By contrast, the makers of the TV programme settle the question of their universal sexual appeal immediately: Edgar-Jones is a knock-out — the sinewy, delicate, quiet and mysterious ying to the big handsome, blue-eyed athleticism of Mescal’s Connell. Both are equally libidinous, so that the production often feels more like high-end pornography than drama, even if the sex escapes gratuitousness by marking the waning and waxing of their relationship. Either way, their goings-on are hardly ‘normal’; nor are they ‘damaged’. They’re enviably perfect.

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I was discomfited to note the quiet but firm moral running through the production: great, truly hot sex is the reward for beautiful, and above all thin girls with stylish hair — Marianne’s fringe and charcoaled eyes, along with her delicately picked-out clavicles and hip-bones, quite often steal the limelight. The same moral is maintained in the sex scene between Connell and his college girlfriend Helen: here is another toned, fatless woman with long brown locks that sexily tousle with sweat as she enjoys Connell. Meanwhile Marianne’s less beautiful friend Peggy (India Mullen) is sexually invisible, and her best friend — a very overweight, sensible girl called Joanna (Eliot Salt) — is rendered entirely mumsy, a foil. Nothing happens to her.

If the sex in Normal People silently reaffirms the enduring gold standard of female slenderness and the kind of sultry mysteriousness evident in Marianne’s long, dark silences, then it is very explicitly didactic in other ways. All sexual exchanges are peppered with nervy utterances of ‘is that OK?’, ‘if that’s OK’, ‘if you want me to’ and so on. The sex between Marianne and Connell is as much about trumpeting the virtues of constant and enthusiastic consent-seeking — indeed of the softly softly feminist man’s approach to shagging — as it is about raw desire. “If you want to stop or anything we can obviously stop, if it hurts or anything we can stop, it won’t be awkward, just say,” says Connell in the first sex scene, when Marianne loses her virginity. This was an object lesson in smart sex for the woke age — take no steps without express permission, especially where women are concerned.

Marianne and Connell’s virtuous sex scenes gleam with a knowing, seductive touch because they were expertly choreographed, emotionally and physically, by an intimacy coordinator. Since MeToo, as sensitivities around consent have been heightened, intimacy coordinators have become mandatory on most major productions to ensure no liberties are taken filming sex scenes and that the actors feel ‘comfortable’.

For Normal People, the BBC hired the sought-after Ita O’Brien, a former dancer and actor who oversaw the action in fellow teen bonk fest Sex Education. Just as the characters constantly seek mutual assurance of emotional comfort, the intimacy coordinator ensures the actors feel just as comfortable.

The language of intimacy coordination, with its emphasis on constant emotional temperature checks, perfectly matches the ideology of the book and — at last — helps shed light on what is meant by ‘normal’. In a world obsessed with policing violated boundaries and outing emotional discomfort, ‘normal’ means either ‘weird’ or ‘damaged’ — which, therapeutic wisdom has it, are traits we should celebrate (unless they involve holding offensive political opinions). “How I act with [Marianne] is my normal personality,” Connell tells a jealous Helen in response to her question of why he is so ‘weird’ around Marianne. “Maybe I’m just a weird person,” he says, concluding a scene crafted to signify who he really belongs with (Marianne).

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Why is the Left so hypocritical about sex?

By Sarah Ditum

Normal People has been hailed for its relatability, with the inference that we’re all weird, we’re all damaged, and we are all saved only by those who truly and authentically love us. Indeed love and damage go hand-in-hand, and emotional vulnerability has become the ultimate aphrodisiac. The scene in which Connell and Marianne’s love enters a new more serious phase revolves around her tearful musing: “I don’t know why I can’t make people love me.” Marianne hints for the first time at the abuse visited on her by her odious brother, confessing to a shocked Connell that she hadn’t told him yet because “I was afraid you’d think I was damaged”. Magic words. Connell’s love surges, as he tells her none of it is her fault and that she is loved. A rush of lust follows.

Later, following the suicide of a friend back in Sligo, and with frequent panic attacks, Connell himself seeks out counselling, and the therapeutic process lends the final episodes their dramatic thrust, winning plaudits from men’s mental health activists. Tick.

Normal People chimes with the growing consensus — even in Britain — that therapy wins all. Indeed, from Wanderlust to Sex Education, no contemporary British drama is complete now without an extended therapy scene. The therapeutic journey is also the dramatic heart of Dolly Alderton’s best-selling Everything I Know About Love, now being made into a TV series too (Alderton was runner-up to Rooney at the 2018 Waterstones Book of the Year Awards).

Neither the fascination with rendering the ‘true’ self fully transparent nor the belief that only through being vulnerable shall we be free are new. Freud unleashed on a mass scale the conviction that our ‘true’ drives lurk below external presentation, but it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that therapy culture and practices really began to suffuse approaches to everything from relationships to feminism to management. As observers noted at the time, this could yield a strangely closed-feeling, narcissistic system of interaction, in which self-discovery was the end point for all endeavours. By the mid-1980s, a series of new women’s magazines were targeting a readership that was, in magazine historian Anna Gough Yates’s words ‘vulnerable’, ‘self-critical’ and ‘insecure inside’. A fit description of the characters in Normal People.

Normal People is the perfect product for a generation taught to seek out and proudly lay claim to sexual and emotional vulnerability. In the past, sex scenes packed full of the considerate, careful hesitation we see here might have garnered laughter and shrieks of ‘get on with it!’. But today, virtue and the erotic go hand in hand. The message of MeToo seems to have won out: respecting boundaries is as hot as the sex itself.