No sex, please, we’re social distancing: how television dramas are adapting to the lockdown two-metre rule
Intimacy coordinator who helps direct love scenes says racy moments will be consigned to imagination
THE lights are low, the passion is high … and the characters are staying two metres apart to respect the rules on social distancing. Welcome to television sex scenes, Covid-19 style.
The BBC’S latest drama, Normal People, is a tender tale of first love that features a number of intimate moments between its two leads, played by Daisy
Edgar-jones and Paul Mescal. But the show’s intimacy coordinator, Ita O’brien, has said it may be among the last for some time to feature scenes in which the actors are within touching distance of each other.
Instead, dramas filmed during lockdown will have to rely on a healthy dose of imagination. O’brien’s job involves working with actors and directors to choreograph love scenes, ensuring that all parties feel comfortable.
Asked how sex scenes can coexist with rules that bar people from close contact, she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s absolutely something that we are considering, as intimacy coordinators … how we respect social distancing so we can support everybody’s health while also creating intimate contact. “There is so much intimacy that we can still tell – intimate stories but through intention, sculpting the gaze and perhaps a movement towards each other that might not require actual touch but which can still generate all that intimacy.”
O’brien also works on the Netflix show Sex Education, which deals frankly with the sex lives of teenagers. The third series was due to go into production in May but has been postponed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The second series of Gentleman Jack, the BBC drama which also featured scenes of a sexual nature, is also on hold.
But if lockdown continues for several months, producers will have to consider whether they should commence shooting with social distancing rules in place. It will render scenes such as the famous pottery scene from Ghost impossible to shoot.
Normal People, an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s acclaimed novel, follows the relationship of two young people as they progress from school in the west of Ireland to university in Dublin.
The director, Lenny Abrahamson, was at pains to make the intimate scenes as comfortable as possible for the actors, particularly Edgar-jones.
He told The Daily Telegraph: “There are a lot of sex scenes and, 10 years ago, a shoot was very male. You’d have a male director, male assistant director, male sound department, male cinematographer, all looking at a woman naked with a man.
“I’ve never been a traditional shouty male director anyway, but this time I made sure Daisy wasn’t the only woman in the room.”
Intimacy coordinators have become commonplace since the advent of the Metoo movement. O’brien said her role was “to provide clear communication around the intimate content and then to put in place a structure that allows for agreement and consent of touch, and then a process to choreograph the intimate content clearly so that everything is done in a professional manner and the actors are able to separate out their personal selves and professional selves”.
Does it matter if you have read Normal People, Sally Rooney’s comingof-age novel, before seeing the BBC TV version? No. What matters is that you were once young. This is a story about first love and growing up, and it captures that time in life so perfectly that watching it transports you back there. It makes you wish you were 18 again, and thank God that you’re not, often in the same moment.
The protagonists are Marianne (Daisy Edgar-jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal), in their final year at school in the west of Ireland. Marianne is lonely, miserable and picked on by classmates, but spirited and fiercely intelligent. Connell is effortlessly popular but more bashful and bookish than his friends. Both leads are terrific and their chemistry is palpable but it is Mescal’s performance that stands out, perhaps because in the first two episodes he has more to convey; Connell is decent yet weak in the face of peer pressure, and less able to articulate his feelings than Marianne. It is a remarkable television debut.
The sex scenes in Normal People are intimate and tender and so true to life – awkward fumbling with a bra, anyone? – that they are a triumph both for the actors involved and for Lenny Abrahamson, who directed them. You expect the camera to cut away and it stays with them, but the scenes never feel exploitative. Abrahamson employed the intimacy coordinator Ita O’brien, who also worked on Netflix’s Sex Education, but that is the only basis on which the two shows should be mentioned in the same breath.
The drama has been divided into half-hour episodes, which is a smart move and one that should be widely adopted (what is this trend lately for two-hour episodes of things?). It leaves you wanting more, and all 12 episodes are currently available on iplayer. I rushed to watch episodes three and four, which move to Trinity College, Dublin, and find the roles reversed: here it is Marianne who finds friends and strength in numbers, while Connell is isolated and out of place.
The university years might be a better fit for the actors, who do look a touch old to be playing Sixth Formers (though it was ever thus: see the high school films of John Hughes). But it is the school days that make your heart ache. Fans of the book worried that the TV series wouldn’t do it justice. Thanks to the performances, the drama isn’t just as good as the book – it’s better.
While trying to entertain yourself in lockdown, have you felt moved to produce a likeness of Chris Whitty? In my case, the answer is no, but perhaps I’m out of step with the general population. Grayson’s Art Club (Channel 4), a new show aiming “to bring the nation together through art”, asked people to create their own works and ended up with both a painting and a clay head of the Chief Medical Officer. We are living in strange times.
The programme has been thrown together at the last minute and has the air of a disjointed Zoom catch-up, but needs must. It has a meandering, makeshift charm, with artist Grayson Perry conducting conversations online and chatting away companionably to his wife, punctuated throughout by his booming laugh. He delighted in the eccentricity of a man who makes portraits out of soy sauce and noodles, and a viral craze for recreating famous artworks using household objects. The hodgepodge of elements includes a celebrity interview of the week – this time with the comedian Joe Lycett – and visits to the studios of artists, plus a section in which members of the public submit their art – strong memories of Tony Hart here – and the best are selected to appear on screen.
Perry is aware of the limitations of the format – “I am unsatisfied by online communication, I must say” – but his informal style is as good a fit as any for it. His bird’s nest hair is also rather zeitgeisty, as he broadcasts to a nation either desperate for a trip to the salon or deciding to give up on hairbrushing altogether.
The theme of the first episode was portraits – hence those surprise appearances by Prof Whitty. It’s not really a how-to guide to painting, save for Perry’s one tip about never starting with the eyes when doing a portrait: “Don’t start at the important bit. Michelangelo didn’t think, ‘You know what? I’ll start at that bit where the two fingers meet in the middle.” Instead, what it transmitted was the benefits of art: the calm it brings, and also the joy. The programme was all over the place, but at its best it was rather fun.
Normal People ★★★★★ Grayson’s Art Club ★★★