It’s strange to see a student standing in the pub right now. He’s tousle-haired and twinkly. He’s our hero. And he’s breaking television’s fourth wall by giving a lecture to camera on viral epidemiology.
Should Ritchie Tozer be worried about his health? No, he says, because the information circulating about this virus is bunk. He calls out a list of rum-sounding aetiologies. Some people think it’s caused by sniffing poppers; others that it arrived from outer space on a comet. It could’ve come from God, or the jungle, or a secret laboratory, or Russia. Captions in the chunky Ceefax font fill the screen with the crowning absurdity: “Homosexuals, haemophiliacs, Haitians.” How, asks Ritchie, can anyone believe in the reality of a disease that only affects groups of people that begin with the letter H? And off he goes, careering around the room, kissing every man he passes.
Ritchie is the protagonist of Russell T Davies’s new Channel Four drama, It’s a Sin, which airs tonight at 9pm. The show assembles a rich and sweet assortment of young and optimistic friends in 1980s London, and then subjects them to the ordeals of the AIDS crisis. Being the work of the screenwriter and producer who regenerated Doctor Who, created Queer as Folk, and cast Ben Whishaw and Hugh Grant as Norman Scott and Jeremy Thorpe, it is a thing of passion and mischief and wit. Davies is a writer in the tradition of Victoria Wood and Tony Warren, creator of Coronation Street. In 1960, Ena Sharples demanded, “are them fancies fresh?” In 1999, a character in Queer as Folk — played by a Corrie alumnus — reported on the events of the night: “It was as big as a baby’s arm.” Same kind of humour, different object.
Davies’s work also expresses a coherent political view: critical of the state but supportive of liberal institutions. The characters of his recent dystopian drama Years and Years knew that their lives were becoming less dystopian when the populist Prime Minister was packed off to jail and the BBC restored to public ownership. In his 2009 Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood: Children of Earth, aliens arrive and insist that humanity hands over 10% of its children. (Young humans, it transpires, are prized for their narcotic properties: the aliens intend to smoke them like joints, and consider it payback for having saved 25 million people from a virulent strain of flu.) Davies takes us into a cabinet meeting in which ministers and special advisers are discussing how to comply with this demand. They order up the OFSTED reports and decide to sacrifice kids from schools with the poorest exam results: “Those destined to spend a lifetime on benefits, occupying places on the dole queue and, frankly, the prisons.”
It’s a Sin has similar points to make. A powerful subplot focuses on a mother who is forced to take her local authority to court to release her sick son from an isolation ward. It’s based on a real case. But as well as obliging us to recall these little-known injustices, the series also gives two other spurs to measure the distance between the present and the past. And they are related.
The first is all the sex. Russell T Davies is good at sex. It’s a subject from which many of his contemporaries seem surprisingly disengaged. In modern free-to-view drama, morgue scenes outnumber bedroom scenes. I haven’t kept a precise tally, but I think that in the last five years I’ve seen fewer orgasms on television than scenes in which characters demonstrate their sadness by lying very still under the bathwater. This was not true of the small-screen culture that formed Russell T Davies and his peers. In the 1970s and 80s, we watched Sheila White’s Messalina hold a marathon orgy in I, Claudius (1976) and Jack Shepherd and Cheri Lunghi pursuing topless conversations about the future of socialism in Bill Brand (1976). We watched Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective (1985), warding off an unwelcome erection with thoughts of Ludovic Kennedy, and, in a less classifiable human act, Bob Peck’s policeman hero in Edge of Darkness (1985) disbursing a grief-stricken kiss to a vibrator he finds among this daughter’s personal effects. Another thing: we watched these scenes with our parents, and survived.
In Davies’s work, sex is rarely the destination of the story, or a secret that the plot works to expose. It attends the lives of his characters, and accompanies them through the narrative. In Queer as Folk, the hero takes a phone call from the hospital while in bed with a scandalously younger partner: he discovers he’s become a sperm-donor dad just as the teenager reaches his climax. In Years and Years, a breathless and passionate scene occurs in a Portakabin between a housing officer (Russell Tovey) and a Ukrainian refugee (Maxim Baldry), as the other characters are absorbing the news that a nuclear bomb has been detonated in the South China Sea. The two men kiss like there’s no tomorrow, and perhaps there isn’t.
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