How 'Lucky' We Am:It's A Sin.

"When I look back upon my life it's always with a sense of shame. I've always been the one to blame for everything I long to do. No matter when or where or who has one thing in common too. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a sin" - It's A Sin - The Pet Shop Boys.

When looking for a title for his five piece drama on growing up gay in London during the first decade of the AIDS crisis (1981-1991), Russell T Davies must have felt The Pet Shop Boys' 1987 No 1 hit was an absolute no-brainer. Not because there is sin, or shame - its eternal and unwanted friend, about being gay, being HIV positive, or dying of AIDS but because huge swathes of British society at the time, from our families to our institutions to our media, insisted that homosexuality was both sinful and shameful and there was often a belief that dying of AIDS was no better than what gay people deserved. 

I grew up in the decade. I remember the jokes and I remember the homophobia that didn't even hide itself behind ribald humour. Judging by the Channel 4 drama, Russell T Davies (so brilliant in the past with Years and Years, Queer as Folk, and, I have been reliably informed, Dr Who) has a pretty good memory of the decade too as is easily evinced by the period trappings that provide the background to a story that proves powerful, emotional, and, you'll not be surprised, ultimately incredibly harrowing.

The Sealink ferry, the cans of Special Brew, the motors (almost always a certain shade of green), the pint glasses, the pubs those pints are consumed in, the crockery, the Golden Wonder crisps, the toga parties, The Cannonball Run on VCR, and This Is Your Life and Michael Barrymore on TV. All of these things belonged exactly in the eighties I lived through and were captured spectacularly and with neither nostalgia nor disdain.

More as a simple fact of life in that era. The music too was an almost encyclopedic journey through the decade's best pop, synth, post-punk, and gay anthems. OMD's Enola Gay, Bad Manners, The Teardrop Explodes, Kelly Marie's Feels Like I'm In Love, Soft Cell, Culture Club, Joy Division, Kim Wilde, Divine, Blondie, Eurythmics, Yazz, Belinda Carlisle, REM, Erasure, The Flying Pickets, Hooked on Classics (!), Kate Bush, Laura Branigan, and, of course, Bronski Beat's Smalltown Boy.

The ultimate anthem of small town alienation and desire for escape. Even the graphic used for the title cards looked like they'd been cribbed from a Wham! t-shirt. But, of course, It's A Sin was far more than a trip down memory lane, a Peter Kay sketch in episode format so we could reminisce on all our yesterdays. It showed how ignorance, homophobia, incuriosity, and a dogged, stubborn determination to stick to the old ways ended up making life a misery for an entire generation of gay men, their friends, and their families.

But not before they'd had a lot of fun first. It's A Sin doesn't shy away from showing how (some of) its main protagonists enjoyed a highly promiscuous lifestyle of threesomes, orgies, and sharing multiple partners at the same time but it doesn't judge them for it and nor should it have done. All but one sexual encounter is consensual and everyone looks like, and agrees they are, enjoying it very much.

The drama revolves around a group of friends who converge together in London and eventually buy a house together, The Pink Palace, which becomes a venue for wild parties, those aforementioned orgies, and even vaguely Dadaist cabaret performances. There's Ritchie (Olly Alexander), over from the Isle of Wight where his parents, Clive (Shaun Dooley) and Valerie (Keeley Hawes), are very much parents of that era.

Clive calls Ritchie a "stupid little dreamer" because he wants to become an actor and Valerie is the dutiful wife of a man who, constantly sporting a brown leather jacket, can barely understand who his own son actually is and calls Margaret Thatcher 'Maggie' to indicate how happily he supports her. Ritchie's best friend, when he arrives in London is Jill (Lydia West - so good in both Years and Years and Dracula).

She's his rock and the pair are soon joined by Roscoe (Omari Douglas), Colin (Callum Scott Howells), and Ash (Nathaniel Curtis), Ritchie's first ever gay lover. Colin's a shy Welsh lad who finds work at a tailoring firm where he fights off the advances of the sleazy lech Mr Hart (Nicholas Blane), earns the nickname Gladys (after Ruth Madoc's character in Hi-De-Hi), and becomes friends with Savile Row salesman Henry Coltrane. An urbane, plummy, and cultured gay man a decade or so older with an Argentian boyfriend Juan Pablo (at the time of the Falklands War this was risking double trouble) who is played, pleasingly, by Doogie Howser MD, Neil Patrick Harris.

Colin's mum, Eileen (Andria Doherty), is the sort of kindly lady who loves her son unconditionally but Roscoe's Nigerian heritage family, sister Solly (Shaniqua Okwok) excepted, prove less understanding of their son's homosexuality. They're very religious and while he's working on a building site they're suspicious about him working with men. When they learn of his true nature and leanings their intolerance and desire to 'cure' him becomes so much of a threat to him that he simply has no choice but to leave the nest.

Something he does with a flourish. Props too should go to Stephen Fry who plays a closeted Tory MP who gets a hard-on thinking about Thatcher and asks his lover to be 'nanny', Neil Ashton as gay activist Grizzle, and, most of all, David Carlyle as Gloria, a Scottish punk a decade or so older than the rest of the gang who has moved down from Glasgow and found, finally, a place of belonging and acceptance. 

The excitement of first moving to London is caught brilliantly and accurately and all the characters, major and minor, are realistic, nuanced, and engrossing. It took me about fifteen minutes into the second episode before I started welling up and by the end of the series I was in bits but that should encourage you to watch, not put you off.

Because It's A Sin is a fascinating piece of social history that finds its parallels, only too neatly, in our current time's Covid pandemic - although it's worth noting the rush to find a vaccine seemed less urgent with AIDS than it did with Covid-19. For some reason.

Similarities are inescapable though. AIDS, like Covid, when it first arrived was a disease nobody truly understood and many, including those who would go on to die from it, denied. The arrival of AIDS, the "gay flu", saw it mistaken for pneumonia or psittacosis (a kind of parrot fever), dismissed as a money making racket for big pharma, and theories come into existence that it was created in a laboratory, spread by the Russians, or by poppers, or by bestiality, or, most weirdly and of its time of all, Freddie Laker. 

Even as lesions start appearing and young men start being taken to hospital, doctors remain dismissive of those eager to be informed about the disease and AIDS patients are virtually imprisoned and treated as a 'public menace'. They're held to blame and, in a very real sense, shamed for what has happened to them.

Families of AIDS sufferers are traduced, turds are posted through their letterboxes, and funeral companies refuse to bury those who have fallen to the disease. Even when a funeral is held the boyfriend of the deceased is barred from attending. Gay men face the threat of the sack from their jobs or the refusal of a mortgage simply because of their sexual preferences, Clause 28 (to stop the 'promotion' of homosexual lifestyles) is put in place by the Thatcher administration, and police brutality is dished out to gay men and their allies in broad daylight.

As the death toll rises steeply and grimly, it becomes apparent that ignorance and homophobia, rather than homosexuality, were, and are, the genuine public menace and for every small victory, like Roscoe pissing in Margaret Thatcher's coffee - "black man's piss" he gleefully adds, there are several far deeper and darker tragedies at play.

Which, by the final episode, become so overwhelming you almost have to steel yourself to watch them. But you should do. Because It's A Sin was brilliant, tender, touching, and still, sadly, highly pertinent. The homophobia and the ignorance of the eighties hasn't simply evaporated. It went off to hide in darkened corners until encouraged, tacitly or explicitly, to return by populist politicians.

You'd think the sight of people wearing face masks in hospitals would seem quite normal now but, somehow, it still looks eerie and scary when those hospitals don't seem to have evolved much since Victorian times. It's A Sin shows that in a stark and honest way and while the party scenes and the friendship bonds between the main characters remind us there is always hope the rife homophobic ignorance at the time, personal, professional, and political, reminds us there is also always hate and though they are always at war with each other I still believe hope triumphs hate every time. Judging by It's A Sin I think Russell T Davies does too. The first masterpiece of 2021.