It’s a Sin is powerful and unflinching; a drama in the true sense of the word, with that delicious sweetness and vulnerability at its heart that’s a Russell T Davies hallmark. There’s glittering ambition, buzzy energy, naïve innocence, and fates entwined. A group of friends, really a little self-made family, are pulled together by fate, proximity, poverty and circumstance. Big characters sweep up the quieter ones in their wake; waifs and strays form an unbreakable life-long bond, and we take that plunge with them, ready for the ride of their lives.
It’s 1981 and we meet adorable little Ritchie (played by Olly Alexander) from the Isle of Wight, off to seek his fortune at university amongst the bright lights of London. His new friends are the gorgeous cross-dressing Roscoe (Omari Douglas), son of a strict Nigerian Christian family who want to pray the gay away, lovely innocent buttoned-up Colin (Callum Scott Howells) from South Wales and mother-hen Jill (Lydia West). I adore her snuggly jumpers and her warm heart. They’re all ready and set to take on whatever London throws at them, and they’ve got big plans for the future. They’re full of life and dynamic energy that looks exhausting to my middle-aged eyes, excited to take all the opportunities for fun they can find, in their studies, their work and their sex lives.
But already there’s a gate crasher at this party. Interspersed in the fantastic campy pop soundtrack there’s whispers of gay men mysteriously dying in New York. And the only outcasts in the local gay bar, so welcoming to everyone else, are the doom-mongers leafleting about a “gay cancer”. As Ritchie says incredulously “How can a disease know you’re gay?”. In the early 80s there’s nothing about AIDS in the news, there are no public health campaigns, GPs are dismissive (the elderly white male doctor as the face of authority is baffled that Jill wants information to help her friends), and conspiracy theories run rife. At this point in time it doesn’t even have a name. Sounds familiar? Having been filmed well before the Covid-19 pandemic, RTD never intended the AIDS storyline to be quite so timely, but the parallels are incredible and the tragedy is acutely painful.
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