Unsought resonance: a scene from Russell T Davies's account of the Aids crisis. Credit: IMDB
It’s strange to see a student standing in the pub right now. He’s tousle-haired and twinkly. He’s our hero. And he’s breaking television’s fourth wall by giving a lecture to camera on viral epidemiology.
Should Ritchie Tozer be worried about his health? No, he says, because the information circulating about this virus is bunk. He calls out a list of rum-sounding aetiologies. Some people think it’s caused by sniffing poppers; others that it arrived from outer space on a comet. It could’ve come from God, or the jungle, or a secret laboratory, or Russia. Captions in the chunky Ceefax font fill the screen with the crowning absurdity: “Homosexuals, haemophiliacs, Haitians.” How, asks Ritchie, can anyone believe in the reality of a disease that only affects groups of people that begin with the letter H? And off he goes, careering around the room, kissing every man he passes.
Ritchie is the protagonist of Russell T Davies’s new Channel Four drama, It’s a Sin, which airs tonight at 9pm. The show assembles a rich and sweet assortment of young and optimistic friends in 1980s London, and then subjects them to the ordeals of the AIDS crisis. Being the work of the screenwriter and producer who regenerated Doctor Who, created Queer as Folk, and cast Ben Whishaw and Hugh Grant as Norman Scott and Jeremy Thorpe, it is a thing of passion and mischief and wit. Davies is a writer in the tradition of Victoria Wood and Tony Warren, creator of Coronation Street. In 1960, Ena Sharples demanded, “are them fancies fresh?” In 1999, a character in Queer as Folk — played by a Corrie alumnus — reported on the events of the night: “It was as big as a baby’s arm.” Same kind of humour, different object.
Davies’s work also expresses a coherent political view: critical of the state but supportive of liberal institutions. The characters of his recent dystopian drama Years and Years knew that their lives were becoming less dystopian when the populist Prime Minister was packed off to jail and the BBC restored to public ownership. In his 2009 Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood: Children of Earth, aliens arrive and insist that humanity hands over 10% of its children. (Young humans, it transpires, are prized for their narcotic properties: the aliens intend to smoke them like joints, and consider it payback for having saved 25 million people from a virulent strain of flu.) Davies takes us into a cabinet meeting in which ministers and special advisers are discussing how to comply with this demand. They order up the OFSTED reports and decide to sacrifice kids from schools with the poorest exam results: “Those destined to spend a lifetime on benefits, occupying places on the dole queue and, frankly, the prisons.”
It’s a Sin has similar points to make. A powerful subplot focuses on a mother who is forced to take her local authority to court to release her sick son from an isolation ward. It’s based on a real case. But as well as obliging us to recall these little-known injustices, the series also gives two other spurs to measure the distance between the present and the past. And they are related.
The first is all the sex. Russell T Davies is good at sex. It’s a subject from which many of his contemporaries seem surprisingly disengaged. In modern free-to-view drama, morgue scenes outnumber bedroom scenes. I haven’t kept a precise tally, but I think that in the last five years I’ve seen fewer orgasms on television than scenes in which characters demonstrate their sadness by lying very still under the bathwater. This was not true of the small-screen culture that formed Russell T Davies and his peers. In the 1970s and 80s, we watched Sheila White’s Messalina hold a marathon orgy in I, Claudius (1976) and Jack Shepherd and Cheri Lunghi pursuing topless conversations about the future of socialism in Bill Brand (1976). We watched Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective (1985), warding off an unwelcome erection with thoughts of Ludovic Kennedy, and, in a less classifiable human act, Bob Peck’s policeman hero in Edge of Darkness (1985) disbursing a grief-stricken kiss to a vibrator he finds among this daughter’s personal effects. Another thing: we watched these scenes with our parents, and survived.
In Davies’s work, sex is rarely the destination of the story, or a secret that the plot works to expose. It attends the lives of his characters, and accompanies them through the narrative. In Queer as Folk, the hero takes a phone call from the hospital while in bed with a scandalously younger partner: he discovers he’s become a sperm-donor dad just as the teenager reaches his climax. In Years and Years, a breathless and passionate scene occurs in a Portakabin between a housing officer (Russell Tovey) and a Ukrainian refugee (Maxim Baldry), as the other characters are absorbing the news that a nuclear bomb has been detonated in the South China Sea. The two men kiss like there’s no tomorrow, and perhaps there isn’t.
It’s a Sin has another sequence to add to this canon, in which Ritchie (Olly Alexander) has sex with eight men in two minutes as the soundtrack thrums to Hooked on Classics, the gloriously naff Royal Philharmonic disco medley. He experiences something intense and upright with a shock-haired boy in the back room of a pub (to Beethoven’s Ninth); is fellated in his student accommodation (Rossini’s William Tell Overture); fucked against a wall (Marriage of Figaro); has a vigorous threesome by his desk (Fantasy Overture from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet); throws a long-haired drama student down on the bed (Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16); and whoops with his legs over the shoulders of a barman with blue eye shadow (Bizet’s March of the Toreadors). And though we know that this story is about contagion and illness and death, Davies declines to rob his characters of their pleasure. The premise of his title is always resisted.
Davies has been gathering his energies to dramatise the 1980s AIDS crisis for more than a decade. It’s pure coincidence that filming had just concluded when Covid-19 entered our lives. But this unsought resonance is now one of its strongest attractions. There are scenes in which characters maintain their distance to avoid infection; scenes of anxious deep-cleaning. A memorable moment puts a young character in pale green PPE as he visits a friend on an isolation ward. On set he must have looked like a visiting alien. On broadcast he’ll just look like somebody in Sainsbury’s. He wonders why he needs a mask. “It’s to protect me, not you, idiot,” says his friend, anticipating one of the commonest exchanges of the last ten months.
And here’s where the series makes its most electric contact with our own moment. It takes pains to track the progress of good, imperfect and downright false intelligence about the AIDS virus through the information networks of the day. The materials may be pre-digital, but the mixture of evolving research, muddled government messaging, ignorant press commentary and outlandish conspiracy theory will be queasily familiar.
Weird though many of them sound, the mess of theories that makes Ritchie deny the seriousness of the AIDS virus are all lifted straight from the historical record. If TV dramas had footnotes — and these days there’s no reason why they couldn’t — then they would have been easy to supply. Ritchie’s list of H-words loomed in the frame of Killer in the Village, a 1983 edition of the BBC2 science series Horizon — which also featured an earnest Manhattan doctor sorting through bottles of amyl nitrate, and calling out their proprietary names: Locker Room, Bolt, Hardware, Thrust. His mention of a secret laboratory memorialises Operation Infektion, a Kremlin disinformation campaign that sought to spread the idea that AIDS was a bioweapon that escaped from a US military research centre.
And that barmy idea about AIDS arriving from space, like a problem from Quatermass? Detailed on the pages of the Daily Telegraph in December 1986 by the astronomer Fred Hoyle and the biologist Chandra Wickramasinghe. “We think it most likely in each instance primary entry was secured through infected rainwater entering lesions in feet in the mainly barefoot populations of the Third World with subsequent transmissions proceeding through human contact.” Today Professor Wickramasinghe is the head of the Centre for Astrobiology at the privately-run Buckingham University. Any future drama about the Covid years will have its choice of similarly cranky characters and ideas.
Should Davies get credit for this historical accident? I think he should. Some writers create stories that are closed and self-contained. Others make work that lets in the audience and their own experiences. He does the latter. It’s a Sin has a quality in common which much of the best art. A glorious promiscuity.
Matthew Sweet is a broadcaster and writer. His books include Inventing the Victorians and Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers and Themselves.
drmatthewsweet 
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SubscribeHmmm…barmy ideas about AIDS in the 1980s, neanderthal panic. Scepticism about the massive reaction to Covid in the 2020s, you’re a granny murderer.
Never forget that Dr. Fauci helped the AIDS panic along by stating that it was possible to spread through casual contact in the home…
Did he really? Very interesting. So, like a lot of these people, he has been wrong about everything forever. Neil Ferguson is, of course, another of these people.
This particular TV dramatist has been subjecting the population to his obsessions, promiscuous homosexuality and left wing propaganda, for years often on the taxpayer funded BBC. It’s not very relevant to most people. The 1980s were certainly very different for me but then if you’re a working class, heterosexual non-metropolitan provincial you can’t expect the BBC to be interested (with the possible exception of left wing activists I suppose)
It’s on Channel 4, not the BBC.
C4 is also in the public sector, despite the advertising.
I’m gay and switched it off after 20 minutes, I found it rather repulsive if I’m being honest. My long term partner remarked it on being something else on TV for straights to hate us for. So much for promoting the cause I suppose.
So in a nutshell, they’ve remade Longtime Companion?
Yes, exactly. Longtime Companion with more attention-seeking.
Why was anyone surprised about this as UK and US males were warned about where they dipped their wicks as long ago as WWII?
As a gay man a straight male friend once said to me ‘Most people haven’t got anything against you gays but do you have to keep sticking it down our throats all the time?” … Freudian slip excluded I know exactly what he meant; I too have been thinking the same for some time regarding the ever more politically motivated fanatical trans community. ‘Hannah with the banner’ as another old friend used to say
I hope he hasn’t missed the opportunity to get the ‘s***k bunnies’ in there. In very early research, before HIV (or HTLV3 as it was then called) was identified, one group of scientists attempted to induce immunodeficiency in rabbits by injecting semen into their rectums.
There is enough hysteria on both sides of the argument. It’s a mistake to think one side have a monopoly. The left, as usual, use their favourite tool of ‘moral hysteria’ and a sense of self congratulationary self righteousness. They whip up the notion the ‘powerful’ want to put profits before people by keeping the economy going at the expense of our health and even our lives. Anyone who disagrees is part of this powerful class or too uneducated to understand their true interests (as the Marxists use to say, they lack class consciousness).
On the right we hear notions of ‘the pandemic has been caused by the Elites to control the population and is being headed by the WEF / WHO’. Elites is a blanket term where the user can insert their most hated group of people (globalists, communists, capitalists, liberal elite, fascists, etc). Evidence cannot be provided as it’s being hidden by the Elites. Any counter evidence must be refuted as it’s simply lies propagated by the elites.
In a sense, both accusations are very similar. Both believe the pandemic is something the ‘powerful’ are doing to the ‘powerless’. They embrace the victim / oppressor narrative. Any counter evidence is dismissed as corrupt. They are self contained belief systems that cannot be challenged.
We need to disregard those who claim they ‘know the answer’ and anyone who claims their opponents are immoral or idiots. Judging by the comments, that includes a lot of people on here.
Davies is a mixed bag. His restoration of Dr Who was miraculous. The plotting was intelligent and the ‘solutions’ to the dilemmas involved genuine thought, not just the waving of a screwdriver’, cleverly catered to an intelligent adult market (me, of course) without losing the children.
Years and Years’ was watchable despite some characters (those in power) being so obviously rather fatuous caricatures of people he did not like.
On the evidence presented here, his new work looks like propaganda for Covid project fear with more unneeded propaganda for the vociferous end of the LBGetc brigade. Rather surprised he has not worked a critical Trump analogy into it. (Not seen it, maybe he has!)
Oh, and his pronouncement on gay actors for gay roles( has anyone checked the cast list for this production – mind you, I am sure it will be on message), for how long has a myriad of gay actors been portraying (very) straight roles?
What on earth are you talking about? This was filmed before coronavirus was even known about in the west, let alone its spread. Take your tin foil hat off.
No need to be rude. I was, as it happens, unaware that it had been filmed prior to Covid, but the fact that it may be unintentional does not change my opinion that it looks like a project fear ad for Covid.
If you’d read the article before commenting on it, you’d have been aware that It’s a Sin was filmed pre-Covid.
OK. My bad. Did not read right through. Still has no effect on my opinion of what it looks like.
Science gave Hoyle and Wickmanasinghe their needed comeuppance when shortly after their idea that seasonal flu (Northern Hemisphere variety only note) was brought by a seasonal cometary shower it was demonstrated absolutely that seasonal flu is cooked up between fowl, wild or domestic and pigs before jumping to us.
In response China has taken the production of both out of small scale farms where they are often farmed together and put them into high intensity, indoor facilities where contagion from outside can be controlled.
We cannot much fault them for not taking action on seasonal flu by seeking to remove the main incubators. Well done China.
Beware of scientists opining outside of our areas of expertise. Neither is a biologist let alone a virologist or epidemiologist. Both were astronomers.
Fred Hoyle also wrote SF (notably The Black Cloud) and non-fiction (Ice, written around 1980 and forecasting a new ice age – St Greta would not have approved!).
Indeed the UK is doing it’s bit too. All domestic fowl have been ordered inside due to bird flu having been detected in wild birds. While we have been in Covid lockdown they have been in flu lockdown.
I’ve been helping fee some. Their keepers take my spent brewing grains off me gratis and I’m told the chooks like it a lot. 4-5kg of grain fills a lot of organic rubbish bags.
Cluck, Cluck, Hic?
Sorry – Couldn’t get it out of my head any other way.
“has sex with eight men in two minutes” so remind me again why aids became so common amongst homosexuals
Another defence of homosexuality. The acceptance and promotion of which has led to the crazy society we see melting around us.
Most adults do not care what goes on between adults (as long as it’s non-violent) behind closed doors, in the privacy of their own quarters…the real problem with this issue, and many other pet leftist causes, is not so much acceptance and promotion, as it is the absolute demand that you accept it on their terms…that you must not merely accept, but must celebrate it, or you are a-homophobe/misogynist/anti-immigrant…fill in the blank.
Like the old song sang: “It started with a kiss, never thought it would lead to this”
Interesting that some of the comments demonstrate such disapproval, even in the 2020s! I suppose I agree that showing gay sex suggestively if not explicitly is likely to be a minority taste. Actually the scenes are very short, unambiguously showing the characters having sex but not dwelling too long on it (or at least each example of it..) and it is very much related with the plot. This contrasts with all too many dramas in which (heterosexual) copulation takes place, often acrobatically against a wall or on a desk) which seem to be there simply to spice up proceedings.
The writer is showing the reality of (some) gay men’s lives. I came out in that period, though the characters seem (so far) to have been having a lot more fun than I had! There were always those very sexually confident people who had a lot of sex but also a lot of more inhibited or diffident, or even would-be monogamous people.
Anyway, as of course we will find out, eventually the fun stopped because of AIDS which will be increasingly the main core of the drama. I thought the hospital scene with the moustachioed chap who worked in Saville Row was excellent and realistic – I have some experience. It also actually managed to avoid having a black nurse or doctor acting in a heroic way, which I was half expecting to happen!
Russell T Davies is in my view a talented and entertaining writer, though with his (rather belated) insistence on gay actors playing gay roles, becoming a bit too ‘woke’. Ultimately this attitude challenges the whole concept of ‘acting’. A young gay person today will in any case have a very different outlook and experiences from one in the early 1980s.
I agree that there is a tendency of our public broadcasters to show more ‘metropolitan’ or fashionable causes or communities. We used to have a very strong TV tradition focussing on white working class lives. Now where it is done it is too obviously far-left in its attitudes. For example when has there been a sympathetic portrayal of Brexit supporters? Russell Davies completely failed in that in his ‘Years and Years’.
However, one or two of the critical comments below seem to verge towards the dreaded term ‘relevance’ – this is often of course what many left-wing critics bang on about. If we can only watch drama of direct relevance to our own lives, what ultimately is its point?
Anyway you don’t have to watch it, and we will see in the longer term how successful our public broadcasters are being in commissioning and producing drama which the wider population want to watch.
Why is it relevant that Buckingham University is privately owned?