Hmmm…barmy ideas about AIDS in the 1980s, neanderthal panic. Scepticism about the massive reaction to Covid in the 2020s, you’re a granny murderer.

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

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.

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.

“has sex with eight men in two minutes” so remind me again why aids became so common amongst homosexuals

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.