IT’S A SIN | WE’VE BEEN WATCHING
Chris Williams offers an overview of Russell T Davies’ latest drama, and considers its position in the pantheon of on-screen depictions of the 1980s AIDS crisis. Warning to those still catching up with It’s A Sin: contains spoilers!
The name of this section is more apt than usual, as it seems we have all been watching the Russell T Davies Channel 4 drama It’s A Sin after its launch. It even broke the record for viewing figures on streaming service All 4. On the night the first episode was broadcast, Fri 22 Jan, it was all over my Facebook; people have already re-binged the box set, and it hasn’t finished showing on TV yet.
In a career of highs – the groundbreaking Queer As Folk, Cucumber, Doctor Who – It’s A Sin might be Russell T Davies’s apex. Certainly, it’s the most autobiographical of all his dramas: the five-episode series is based on memories of he and his Welsh friends first moving to London in the 1980s, during the first emerging AIDS crisis. Playing out over a decade, 1981-91, these new transplants to the English capital live in a house they dub ‘The Pink Palace’, as indeed the director did in real life.
If you can have a main character in an ensemble, here it would be Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander’s Ritchie Tozer, who kicks off the first episode. Yet it’s about all of them, not just the ones on screen: all the victims and survivors, the Ritchies, Colins and Jills. Outside of the main cast, the ever-busy Keeley Hawes proves why she gets the ‘and’ in the last episode cast credits.
Even though It’s A Sin has elements of an AIDS drama, it’s not all harrowing – although it is quite. For one, there are Davies’ irreverent meta-references, from the Les Miserables-alike musical that Jill acts in to a soapy 80s period drama that I could only think was a nod to the original Poldark and the like. One of the most poignant, and most Davies-esque, scenes comes when Ritchie appears in a sci-fi show, Doctor Who in all but name. Davies resurrected the cult show in the 2000s, of course, but Ritchie’s character is also named in tribute to Davies’ friend Dursley McLinden, who acted in 1988 Who serial Remembrance Of The Daleks and sadly died in 1995 aged 30, seven years after contracting HIV/AIDS. Ritchie’s role prompts the discovery that his HIV has developed into AIDS after a makeup artist tells him there’s “something wrong” with his skin. Davies had first met McLinden through Welsh actress Jill Nalder, who inspired Jill in the drama and is interviewed here: demonstrative that It’s A Sin is not just a telly show, but a fount of interesting, sad and lovely real-life stories and people.
As someone who has previously sought out similar dramas and books, a British story hits harder when it’s closer to home – literally in one case, as I’ll explain. Even having seen and read similar scenes I was still shocked and saddened: I didn’t know they locked patients in their hospital rooms in the early days of the crisis, and was unaware of the dangerous myths like men drinking battery acid as a ‘cure’.
One of the most heartbreaking stories is the shy, Welsh character of Colin. In a period when AIDS was seen first as an American problem, then a London illness, big cities are often the settings for dramas on the subject. Colin is played by Callum Scott Howells [interviewed by Buzz last month], who went to the same school as me; I found his death all the more heartbreaking, I think, because he talks like me.
It amounts to a gap in our shared knowledge, then, that cursory internet searches for accounts of the AIDS crisis in Wales currently reveal little. The closest thing I initially found was an article by a nurse in Bristol for The Tab, which itself seems to have come about because of It’s A Sin; likewise, in the course of my writing this piece WalesOnline uploaded drag queen Marcia Bassey Jones’s account of the crisis from a Cardiff perspective. Hopefully others will be coming.
The sad truth is that people either died in London – like Terry Higgins, originally from Haverfordwest and whose death in 1982 gave the Terence Higgins Trust its name – or ‘went home’. As Tracy Ann Oberman’s character Carol Carter says, “There’s a lot of boys who are going home these days” – there, they’d be kept a secret and inevitably die of ‘cancer’ or ‘pneumonia’. Though I was too young to be aware of anything, my mother remembers the protests on TV and that infamous public information advert; my earliest memory is a schoolfriend saying that Freddie Mercury died because he kissed men.
So why has it taken this long for a British drama to concentrate on such a serious time in recent history? Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart was written in 1985 and Angels In America was first performed in 1991, but UK offerings were pretty much limited to EastEnders character Mark Fowler. Maybe the element of humour present in most UK programmes are one reason for this; maybe we had to wait for Russell T Davies’s unique style, comedy within sorrow that will have you laughing and crying at the same time. Britishness, and its mixture of reservedness and outrage, is too a likely factor. A Tory government was in power during all of the 1980s and most of the 90s, and any hint of gay storylines on UK TV was met with disgust from the right-wing press. Amidst all this, Section 28 was in existence until – unbelievably – 2003.
For those interested in similar themes, obvious titles come to mind. As well as the aforementioned Angels… and The Normal Heart, recent US drama Pose features HIV/AIDS storylines. Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City is a series of novels spanning the 70s up to the present, going from the dark days of the 80s to characters living with AIDS in later books. Two non-fiction books chronicling the early days are And The Band Played On and How To Survive A Plague, the latter adapted from a documentary.
European film also has some powerful titles. Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo; 120 Beats Per Minute; a heartbreakingly powerful three-episode mini-series from Sweden, Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves, shown on BBC4 in 2012 and which I still think about. Even remembering the title – taken from a warning from one nurse to another in an early scene – makes me sad.
Literature seems to be similar to drama in the absence of British voices, with the exception of Will Self’s Dorian, An Imitation and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line Of Beauty. Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers is half set in 1980s Chicago as a young art director and group of friends succumb; Christodora is a decade-spanning novel that takes in the crisis, and its author Tim Murphy’s coverage on HIV-prevention pill regimen PrEP was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award For Outstanding Magazine Journalism. The Angel Of History, by Rabih Alameddine, involves Satan and death while the novel’s protagonist remembers his past; it’s a bit too cerebral for me to properly explain but I recommend it.
One of the best things about It’s A Sin – and there are a lot of great things – is that it’s getting people talking again and wanting to learn more. It will make you want to go out, live, and appreciate how far things have come. I could have probably gone on for another page, but I’m off to watch the series all over again!
It’s A Sin can be seen here: www.channel4.com/programmes/its-a-sin
The Terrence Higgins Trust is the UK’s leading HIV and AIDS charity, with centres in Cardiff and Swansea. Info: www.tht.org.uk
words CHRIS WILLIAMS images CHANNEL 4
