From the joy to the fear, this is the Eighties in blazing colour
It’s a Sin Channel 4 ★★★★★
‘Ihad so much fun,” says a character in It’s a Sin (Channel 4) as he lies in a hospital bed, dying of Aids. “That’s what people will forget. That it was so much fun.” And that’s what you take away from this series, probably the best thing Russell T Davies has ever written. The gay community, devastated by this disease, was treated with ignorance and sometimes astonishing cruelty by society at large. Davies doesn’t shy away from that. But what he has delivered is a drama that radiates joy.
It’s full of sex. How could it not be, given the subject matter? But it’s no more shocking or graphic than plenty of other shows on TV, and no more scandalous than Davies’s earlier series about gay men, Queer as Folk, which was on Channel 4 more than 20 years ago.
It’s London, 1981. Ritchie (Olly Alexander) has left his home on the Isle of Wight to take up a place at university. Colin (Callum Scott Howells) is newly arrived from the Welsh Valleys as a Savile Row apprentice. And Roscoe (Omari Douglas) has walked out on his deeply religious family after they threaten to ship him back to Nigeria.
Roscoe is out and proud from the beginning. Ritchie quickly embraces gay life and treats it as one glorious party. Colin – oh, how you will take Colin to your heart. He is one of life’s innocents, and I’m not sure if he ever takes off his anorak. They all end up living in a rackety flat they christen the Pink Palace, with a woman called Jill (Lydia West) who starts out as a friend and becomes a ministering angel. At the end of episode one, the boys are asked what they see in their futures. Ritchie dreams of starring in the West End and becoming a film star. Roscoe says, just you wait, give me five or six years and I’ll be stinking rich. Colin would be happy to stay just where he is. I’d love to be able to tell you that all those wishes come true.
As in so much of his work, Davies switches seamlessly between tragedy and humour. There are little jokes sprinkled throughout about closeted celebrities: “Barry Manilow. Your father says he’s queer, which is ridiculous,” chortles Ritchie’s mum, Valerie (Keeley Hawes).
He also knows how to confound our expectations. The coming-out scene we’re braced for at Ritchie’s house turns out to be him announcing to his parents that he’s switching to a drama course, not that he’s gay. In Valerie, Hawes is a mother who adores her son yet understands almost nothing about him, and when times get tough she does not behave as you think she would.
The show is directed with energy by Peter Hoar, as Davies’s script – aided by a fabulous Eighties soundtrack – propels us through the decade. Early on, Ritchie is so busy gazing across campus at a handsome man (Nathaniel Curtis) that he doesn’t pick up on the conversation happening behind him, with two girls talking about an odd story they’d heard: dozens of gay men dying of “this cancer thing” in New York. Fear and confusion and panic build, and the prejudice against the gay community is shocking.
Younger viewers may come to this with no knowledge of the Aids crisis. I remember those terrifying public information films; the news of Rock Hudson; the interventions of Diana, Princess of Wales. But I had no idea until I watched this that patients were kept as virtual prisoners in hospital, left to die the loneliest of deaths.
Alexander, best known as a pop star in the band Years and Years, has a big responsibility in leading this cast and he does a creditable job, embodying the youthful exuberance of a generation. But some of the strongest performances are on the edges: Gary Lewis is terrific in a tiny role as a homophobic father burning with rage and grief. It’s testament to the show’s quality that I felt the deaths of minor characters as deeply as the fates of the leads. In the final episode, Jill sits by the bedside of a man we don’t even know – and yet the scene had me weeping. Amid the sorrow, though, don’t forget what fun they had.