It’s 7.30am on a grey Thursday in White City. A long line of brightly dressed girls loiter on an unglamorous stretch of pavement. Middle-aged women raise embarrassed eyebrows at each other. Twenty-somethings, like me, scroll through their phones. Teenagers gather in circles, whispering feverishly. A twelve-year-old with her mother clutches a fake ID, aching with anxiety. Women young and old have hauled themselves to BBC Television Centre to stand before five figures of human perfection.
Like dolls, the One Direction boys are at once flawless and utterly quotidian. Plucked almost at random from the churning conveyor belt of delusional teenagers queueing on their own sad bit of pavement for a shot at stardom, they were irresistibly normal: youthful but average-looking, as charming as most confident 16-year-olds, and passably talented. As their fame snowballed, they worked hard to maintain this image of normal boys in unusual circumstances: unexceptional but for a few key exceptions, unremarkable yet constantly remarked upon, extra/ordinary. And the thing that exalts them above their own mediocrity is utterly outside of their control.
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