IT’S A SIN
RUSSELL T. DAVIES HEADS BACK TO THE ’80S – AND THE AIDS CRISIS…
New ’80s-based drama by Russell T. Davies. He’s always on our mind.
Number 159 Routemaster bus is parked outside Savile Row tailors Culver & Hound, where a billboard advertises ‘Dortman Electronics’ (“Bring The Magic Home With Cinema Stereo Sound”) nearby. We are unmistakably in early ’80s London, albeit reimagined in Manchester for the purposes of a new five-part drama. Russell T. Davies, saviour of Doctor Who and now creator of It’s A Sin, laughs that “to find 1980s London in London, we’d have had to shoot in one little corner of Soho…”
The show – named after Pet Shop Boys’ operatically defiant 1987 charttopper – focuses on four teenagers living through the decade in the shadow of Aids. Ritchie (Olly Alexander) yearns to escape the dull conservatism of the Isle of Wight; Roscoe (Omari Douglas) seeks sanctuary in London after being outed by his evangelical Nigerian parents; sensible, sheltered Colin (Callum Scott Howells) is from the Welsh valleys; and Jill (Lydia West) is their supportive and apparently unshockable confidante. The quartet end up in the Pink Palace, a London bedsit where they find community, safety and themselves.
Seeking sanctuary from the cold in the wood-panelled boardroom of the gentlemen’s outfitters (in real life the scarcely less posh Manchester Tennis And Racquet Club), are the shop’s newest employee and one of its oldest, as respectively played by Howells and Neil Patrick Harris, who is as surprised to find himself playing a plummy Brit as the rest of us. “I was taken aback!” he says, Howells laughing alongside him. “I could be Colin’s adversary, but I become his mentor, showing him different ways of existing. This slice of life is trying to show all the iterations of how gay men lived in the world, so it needs to include an older, potentially wiser person.”
STRANGE DAYS
Davies was 18 in 1981; each of the young leads reflects a part of himself at a time when shame, fear and ignorance offered a lethally effective environment for the virus to spread. “It was brand new, and our means of finding out about it all were so limited,” he remembers. “I don’t think I’d ever seen that sheer disbelief portrayed before, the impossibility of there being a virus apparently targeted at gay men, just 12 years after the laws had changed and we’d finally got equality.”
Yet while It’s A Sin is inevitably about death, it also rejoices in life. “I wanted to capture the strangeness, the madness and wild hilarity of it as well as the desperation,” says Davies. “Life doesn’t stop when terrible things happen.”
“I did wonder if the vibe on set would be more serious,” nods Harris. “But it’s such a joyous celebration of family and individuals coming together at a time when they weren’t aware of repercussions. None of it is played
with foreboding.” The veteran-andnewcomer pairing of Harris and Howells is replicated across the show: Roscoe has a fling with Stephen Fry’s patrician Tory MP Arthur Garrison, while Ritchie’s parents, the Tozers, are played by Keeley Hawes and Shaun Dooley.
“Those older actors flocked to the project,” says Davies. “If I’d sent a murder mystery to Neil then I probably wouldn’t have got past his agent’s PA, but you knew he’d commit to this subject matter. Every one of them rattled off a list of friends [who have passed away] and the conversations on set were extraordinary. Not a day would pass without remembering someone, reviving their memory.”
For Hawes, it was a no-brainer. “It’s so rare to read something that knocks you sideways. It’s amazing that you can live with someone and not know them at all, but the Tozers eventually have to face up to a new reality. Many people thought you could catch it holding hands and so on. It was utterly terrifying, but we all knew someone like the Tozers with those opinions.”
FOLK LORE
Alexander, who started as an actor before global pop stardom with Years & Years beckoned, has long been a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ issues. “I didn’t have any plans to get back into acting, but I jumped at the chance as soon as I heard Russell was making a new TV show. Queer As Folk was such a powerful series for me and he’s a hero of mine. Broadcasters are still wary of a show where the tagline could be, ‘It’s a drama about Aids.’ It’s important to say this show is groundbreaking in that way, but it’s also a story about human beings growing up and falling in love.” While it may prove a reminder for some, for others it will be an education as the full horror of that decade fades into history. “I’m excited for my generation to watch it,” enthuses Howells. “I wasn’t massively educated on this period, so we’ll see how lucky we are and how much progress has been made since then, but also what still needs to happen.”
In short, reckons Davies, it is a drama whose time has finally come. “So many people died of Aids in the ’80s and their parents said it was cancer. It’s still said to this day. Those false memories can become fixed and untruths pass into history, so it feels like time to say: this is what really happened.” Gabriel Tate
‘IT’S SO RARE TO READ SOMETHING THAT KNOCKS YOU SIDEWAYS’ KEELEY HAWES
IT’S A SIN AIRS ON CHANNEL 4 THIS MONTH.