It's A Sin has existed in many forms before it was the show you're about to watch. When Russell T Davies started writing it, in 2015, it was The Boys – changed in part because Amazon adapted a superhero comic by this title recently – and before that it was a nameless thought, which he first mentioned to Catriona McKenzie at Granada in 1995. It was then that he first discussed that his childhood friend, Jill, kept frequenting the Aids wards of hospitals to sit with estranged men dying of a mysterious illness. “She said, ‘That's a good idea for a drama.’ I haven't seen her for years, actually,” says Davies. “I keep meaning to write to her to tell her she inspired this.”
McKenzie is a crucial figure in the story of Davies, one of our most prolific writers of the LGBTQ+ British experience. Davies cut his teeth with her at Granada after a stint at the Children’s BBC, where he made a “lovely run-around adventure” called Dark Season – “quite expensive, very nice” – starring a 15-year-old Kate Winslet and Blake 7’s Jacqueline Pearce as his first gay character. “She's obviously a lesbian. She has a beautiful Teutonic sidekick, called Helga or Inga – Inga! – at her side. And in rehearsals, I’d say, ‘Oh, she's lesbian,’ which Jacqueline used to just adore.” At Granada he was tasked with creating an almost absurd number of soaps to fill odd slots in the schedule, “like 10.30 at night or 2.30 in the afternoon”, when soaps were big and these writers rooms functioned as conservatoires for screenwriters. With a need to find new plots other than murder, affairs and crimes of passion, Davies and the writers turned to including an increasingly wide array of LGBTQ+ characters. “That wasn't me getting on a soapbox,” says Davies, before changing his mind. “There was a drive in me, actually, as we went on. It was me saying, we need to be seen, we need to be visible.” Suddenly, there were bisexual affairs, lesbian vicars, twists on familiar stories made fresh with the new quality of sexuality in the mix. “So the gay characters just kept pouring out, partly because a lot of us were gay. The producers were gay and the bosses were gay. So it was a very safe space to do that.”
At last he was given a show to run: The Grand, set in a Manchester hotel in the 1920s. “It was kind of like Downton Abbey, but set in a hotel and with 1/100th of the budget.” Production grew increasingly difficult as the show went on and while Davies didn’t go into details he describes it as “a runaway train... It was very much sink or swim on that show. And so I decided to swim.”
The Grand’s episodes all focused on A plots, B plots and C plots for the maids, guests and owners, but eventually he decided to write an episode solely focused on the barman, Clive, and his homosexuality. The idea did not go down well with Granada execs. “Not because it was gay, they loved the gay story. But because it broke the format of the show, because it didn't have the maids.” Davies would go into meetings with execs and try to read their notes upside down as he sat across the table from them – “I'm very good at reading upside down; it's a good skill” – and whenever they tried to make him change the format he refused to budge. He even had to write a letter of apology to one exec after he said to him, “What do you know about life? You're part of a church choir.” “Oh, I was young and vile!” But, he says, it taught him exactly the type of writer he wanted to be: “I will take any note, if it's good. If it's not good, you can try all you like, you can bring the forces of heaven and hell against me and I will simply sit there refusing to rewrite a word.”
But, perhaps most importantly, this was when Catriona McKenzie – aforementioned champion of a proto-It’s A Sin – spotted Davies’ talent. When she later went to Channel 4, she took him with her, remembering how well he’d written gay storylines and in particular that episode of The Grand. This is how he developed the show that made his name: Queer As Folk, a revolutionary and sexy look at gay life in Manchester, starring a young Charlie Hunnam as a boy who gets rimmed in the first episode.
Just like Queer As Folk, a rim job stands out among the first scenes we see in It’s A Sin, a show that feels inextricably linked to Davies’ other work. “I think everything I write is set in the same world,” he says, “but the weird thing about my life is that I've written them all out of order.” To him the natural chronology would be It’s A Sin, Queer As Folk and his Bafta-winning show about “a miserable gay man who creates problems himself”, Cucumber. “One day gay historians can watch it in that order, if anyone's remotely interested.” (Like a Skywalker saga of dicks? “Exactly!” he says, laughing.) While in Queer As Folk, Aidan Gillen’s Stuart glides his tongue up the ludicrously pert backside of a (let’s be honest, troublingly) young Nathan (Hunnam), here Ash Mukherjee (Nathaniel Curtis) pauses just as he’s about to eat out Ritchie (Olly Alexander) to let him know Ritchie needs to clean himself up. When I saw it, I screamed: there is no gay man alive who is not familiar with this conversation and yet I’d never seen it on screen before. This was not a fantasia, but a moment that, as Davies says, is about the show “getting right down to the level of the virus”, gesturing on Zoom as if lowering a camera down to follow the lovers to the floor. “The story begins in the fucking and I'd be censorious if I wasn’t there with them.”
On its surface, It’s A Sin can feel quite grungy in comparison to Queer As Folk’s sleek nymphomania. Queer As Folk is almost absurdly celebratory and at the time gay viewers found this jarring in the years after the Aids epidemic (as Davies pointed out himself recently, that was sort of the point.) It’s A Sin, meanwhile, has an air of being much more melancholic, a requiem to a generation of boys that a homophobic world let die with our backs turned to them. But, as Davies himself said, this is something of a simplistic reading of two shows that exist in a weird kind of synergy. “I think you're underplaying slightly how much of a celebration It's A Sin is and, actually, the darkness is in Queer As Folk as well.” In the latter, he reminded me, a man drops dead on a one-night stand. “That's a story they tried to stop me doing; no one at Channel 4 wanted that.” Once again, he resisted. “Because they wanted pure celebration and I said that's not true. You can't call my life a celebration.”
Born and raised in Swansea, Davies tried his hand at writing in his teens, when we would write Welsh language for the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre Company. He went on to study English Literature at Oxford and, while Davies heard word of Aids here and there, it wasn’t until 1983, when he picked up a copy of Him magazine with the headline “Aids Gay Death-Plot Panic” on it, that he realised it was more than just hearsay from across the Atlantic.
While Davies, just like the characters on screen, was 18 in 1981 and finding his way as a gay man in the world, he’s always made it clear he sees himself as “rather more well-behaved” than his Bacchic characters. He was, by his own admission, not going out on the gay scene a whole lot in the 1980s, though this did not make him immune to losing men close to him. He kept his head down and worked, giving money here and marching there, but largely leaving others to rage against the dying of the light. He started working for BBC Wales’ Children's Department in 1985, doing everything from presenting to working through the show’s fan mail. He made the move into writing scripts there – leading to the aforementioned Dark Season and other shows – before heading to Granada in the 1990s.
It’s A Sin, in some ways, is a processing of a difficult time for him and the gay men around him, a way of speaking out about it now when he has long said he didn’t feel he did it enough then. But the show also has another inspiration: his partner, Andrew Smith, passed away in 2018 after being diagnosed with brain cancer seven years prior. Smith had been given a three per cent chance of surviving and the couple left LA – where Davies was reportedly being courted to write a Star Wars TV series – and they came back to Britain to be near family and the NHS. Smith’s illness was another impetus to write the show, Davies has said, seemingly played out in a dozen spectacularly written hospital scenes, loaded with compassion and rage and the unique way you misunderstand people when you love them.
All this remorse and anger and grappling with loss is beautifully articulated in It’s A Sin, but so are the joyous parts of being gay. It’s A Sin relishes in the beauty of homosexual friendship, in queer culture across the LGBTQ+ umbrella, and there are glorious montages of smiling men topping and bottoming in literal gay abandon. While it is brutal to watch, even as a man who never lived through the worst years of the epidemic, it also manages to create moments as outrageous as Stuart almost ploughing down schoolkids in his jeep in the Queer As Folk opener, often through the antics of the gamine Roscoe Babatunde (Omari Douglas). It is much more complex than simply being gloomy, just as any epidemic or pandemic is more than just the tragedy, and it is this complexity that Davies’ work is often not credited with: whether that be by perplexed straight viewers or overly demanding queers.
It’s A Sin has been hotly anticipated since its announcement, in part because it is the first British drama, arguably, since The Line Of Beauty to give this much time and attention to the Aids crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Casual culture vultures might be forgiven for thinking that HIV never left the eastern seaboard, so dominated by New York stories is our cultural consciousness: The Normal Heart, Angels In America, The Hours, The Inheritance. Recently, Australia has reclaimed its part in this horrible epidemic in Holding The Man and 120 BPM showed the activists of Act Up did brilliant things in Paris too. Yet, culturally, it can seem that London never experienced it. Our nation’s own Aids crisis has been forgotten for many reasons: by survivors who, understandably, want to put it behind them; by people who actively tried to erase evidence that loved ones were gay or died of such a stigmatised disease; and by a society that likes to pretend it wasn’t really our problem and that it was an anomaly, best consigned to memory rather than history books.
Yet somehow, in the build up to a show that delicately, elegantly and forcefully reminds us of a sad era in British history, the dominant clamour from our nation’s press is not about how history is about to be reclaimed, but instead about the fact Davies believes gay actors play gay parts better. “I feel strongly that if I cast someone in a story… they are not there to ‘act gay’,” Davies told the Radio Times, “because ‘acting gay’ is a bunch of codes for a performance. It’s about authenticity, the taste of 2020.”
The most annoying part about the bonfire of hot takes this remark inspired is the fact the people who care least about it are gay men, myself included. Can straight people play gay roles? Sure, sometimes. But for every Daniel Day-Lewis in My Beautiful Laundrette there’s James Corden's mincing abomination of a performance in The Prom. It's not that deep and it's not that important and until someone tackles it with real nuance, this should not be what It's A Sin is remembered for or what people go into it thinking, antagonised by someone they consider excessively liberal.
But It's A Sin shouldn't be remembered for the controversy about its casting, because gay art has been victim of this same storm in a teacup punditry for years and Davies knows it better than anyone. The chest puffing and Mary Whitehouse-ing of the heterosexual media is one thing, but gay men are uniquely bad at being happy with the representation they get.
Davies remembers specifically when watching Queer As Folk with a friend who had been the main inspiration for Stuart. “Every time Stuart came on screen he huffed, he swore, he'd say, ‘This is rubbish’ – I mean to do that probably kind of suggests what sort of man he was – and I found that fascinating because it was a very genuine accurate portrayal of him. He simply couldn't identify with himself at all.” Davies says there are two problems at play: there is a lack of representation, yes, but, “There's the problem that when you are represented, it's just not seen.”
The ability for gay men to find only negatives when finally offered representation is something I know all too well: long before I was out, I used to complain about Doctor Who being “too gay”, as if I myself wasn’t desperately craving a queer version of space. As a community, we have an amazing ability to be apathetic about the work that mirrors us until it’s too late, at which point we then venerate it to the position of a cult classic. Davies, as one of the most prominent purveyors of gay stories in this country, has seen this himself many times. But he understands it, because he does it too. “It's like if an extremely camp gay character walks onto screen, I feel my heart sink. If a very, very straight-acting character walks on screen, I feel my heart sink.” He highlights Ben Mitchell and Callum Highway, a gay couple currently in Eastenders. While there's a lot to praise there, he says, “There's not a moment when they kick off their heels and start doing ‘Singin' In The Rain’. But, actually, I've seen men like that exist,” says Davies, before a pause. “Or do they?”
Trying to capture an entire community is a daunting task; giving full justice to their overlooked traumas even more so. But like Angels In America before it, It’s A Sin relies on how individual people and their marginalisation or beliefs affect their assessment of the large, often incomprehensible events occurring around them. This focus on a polyphony of singular voices, rather than a wide panorama of the lay of the land, allows Davies to explore the British Aids crisis in microscopic detail and allow us very natural chances to briefly see how things are going elsewhere, such as when characters return from brief stints in America or Nigeria.
This was not always the way in for Davies, however. Originally, the show was almost going to be a docudrama, looking at the disease on a national scale: “The first patient arriving on that ward; Margaret Thatcher and Norman Fowler properly arguing over those Aids health safety adverts; Princess Diana taking someone by the hand. That's a great drama! I might write that one day.” He wrestled with this for a long time before realising that this is not why he, specifically, was commissioned to cover this time in British history. “I had a word with myself, for the 100th time, that I'm here to write in the way that I write, which is to invent a bunch of lovely, ordinary characters going through extraordinary things.”
Instead, we are not confronted by a series of decisions that could change the course of anything, but simply the moments of compassion and denial that help a group of young, vulnerable people either survive or become victims. It’s in the helplessness, and the power of people’s attempts to fight back in the face of such unending loss, that the show finds its real power. Small moments, such as when Jill (Lydia West) shatters a beloved friend’s mug because she can’t divine how much she’d need to clean it after someone with HIV drinks from it, or when someone discusses how men are drinking battery acid to try and cure themselves, are arguably much more powerful than watching the epidemic play out in Westminster.
It’s A Sin owes a debt to its predecessors, sure, but perhaps most impressively it manages to both engage with – and be completely apart from – the work before it. This is in part because Davies has watched everything there is to watch and their focuses gave him permission to step away from those areas of expertise: “The fury of The Normal Heart allowed me to not quite get too furious; 120 BPM convinced me activism isn’t at the centre of this drama,” he explains. Other times it simply removed options for him, because they’d been done so well before. After seeing the end of part one of the play The Inheritance, for example, in which dozens of supernumeraries take to the stage as the ghosts of the dead to shake hands with a young gay man, “I stood there with people sobbing on the pavement and I was fucking furious. That's my ending!”
But he enjoys dancing around his sources, he says. The emancipation offered by avoiding all his predecessors, it seems, has helped Davies to remember afresh “what I realise on every show: that I'm here to write in the way that I write, not in the way that other people write”. So it was with Doctor Who when the BBC approached him for his uniquely camp vision and so it is with his bespoke approach to Aids, informed by his memories of also being young and queer in the 1980s and the lives he wishes hadn’t been cut quite so short.
Unlike all the shows he wrote with speed and efficiency before, It’s A Sin was different: “I found it very, very slow to write. I'm a fast writer – well, I think about things for 25 years so that then I can write quite quickly – and I was unusually slow. Normally I know which way to go and what my instincts are. And I found myself with a lot of choices on this.” By the time he found what he wanted it to be, and his pace picked up, “that was, I think, some sort of catharsis. Some kind of a joy.”
More than anything, he says, he knows the show says something true because there is something heartbreaking about it. “And that's got nothing to do with what I've written and almost nothing to do with that wonderful cast. It’s my memories of the people we lost, surging upwards. It breaks my heart, this piece of work. I think for people who were there, and for people who were wise to what happened, it will be very tough in places. But a good sort of tough.” Said childhood friend Jill, the source of one of the show’s main characters and who appears herself as the character’s mother, has been calling around people they knew at the time, “Out of respect to say, ‘Look, come and enjoy this, but also this might be really triggering.’”
Finally, It’s A Sin has arrived on British screens: slowly built, from 1995 until 2021, from Jill sitting on Aids wards to appearing on Channel 4 on a Friday night; the story he wanted to tell before all the others, back when something like this would be almost impossible to screen. But more than that, more than the representation and the history it saves from the scrapheap, it is simply a fantastic piece of drama: it will leave you sobbing and broken by its end, a story that pulls absolutely no punches, as remorseless as the institutional cruelty that killed a generation of brilliant young men. It is, simply put, great bloody television. This, he says, is something that gets forgotten about his success: “This job isn't just about gayness,” he says, laughing. “The fact is, I deliver. I deliver on time, on budget – more or less – and I deliver what I pitch. That's the secret to being a successful writer, full stop, to give them what they paid for. It's a job. It's money. They've given you six million quid, they want seven million quids’ worth of product back. That's what I deliver and, professionally, that’s stronger than anything else.”
It's A Sin is on Channel 4 every Friday at 9pm.
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