It's a Sin, 9 pm Channel 4, 22nd Jan CONTAINS SPOILERS **titled edited by MNHQ**

[notawittyname1954]

I keep seeing trailers for this. Anyone else looking forward to it?

Yes, probably. I just thought the comparisons were haunting, but I guess that was part of the impact.

Finished watching today, oh my, what a programme! Amazing writing. I was 10 on 1983, so knew a bit of what was going on, loved with a totally homophobic and racist dad, can see him in Richie's dad. My god I cried so much, I never realised how people were treated, totally like leper's. Awful!

Just finished it. Feeling tearful and emotional and just terribly sad. Beautifully done. Really, really brilliant.

Thankyou @HomeschooIerRockthemicrophone. I know we can Google but its helpful to have recommendations.

No, I don't think the situations were the same - Colin had dementia, which is why he had no inhibitions. Ritchie, I thought, was purging, reaching back in desperation to an earlier time, what could have been, whilst aware that he was offloading to a straight man who wasn't going to reciprocate. I didn't see it as a physical manifestation or symptom rather just regret, mental anguish and trying to buy time by living in the moment/rewrite history/one that got away.
Ritchie was complex - most would say selfish - and certainly sleeping with others knowing but not disclosing your status is a criminal thing to do ( a girl member of the German group No Angels was given a 2 year suspended sentence and 300 hours of community service for sleeping with 3 men and infecting one).
But Ritchie wasn't necessarily alone in the hedonist mentality/rage against death/deep denial and whoever you sleep with is usually complicit in a decision not to use condoms - it's just him continuing to sleep around knowing he was positive which is immoral (and brave of RTD to put it in).
I don't know the psychology of it but have read (I think in the David France memoir) some men wanted to contract HIV to be the same status as peers or lovers, or even to get it out the way/thought they were positive anyway - others later began to fetishise barebacking and then when pRep came out you had the whole Truvada whore slut-shaming going on.
I tend to always take the view that I live in a glass house, although straight and female therefore lower risk - lower not low, not zero - as I said, I took long-term committed partners at face-value and didn't always use condoms myself so, when reading of promiscuity or barebacking I can understand it. Deliberately not divulging status is trickier territory.
I would find that hard to forgive.
Are people more complacent these days? Hard to say - you have the increase in internet porn, anal being normalised almost for teen girls, reports of elderly women being infected, an increase in STDS in general...but I am not in nursing, I am in education. I know we teach about condoms, I know we teach about diversity - to that end, things should be better in terms of knowledge, but some young people may know little of HIV - not lived through it - so if anything, I hope that the series raises discussion.

Just finished this and feel so sad, but what beautiful writing from RTD.

I didn’t really take in the need for ‘safe sex’ until a bit after the 1987 publicity campaign as a straight female. I was already 22 by then and had had a few sexual partners, just happily using the pill alone. By 23 I met my future H so didn’t even use condors with him. I feel lucky that I had my ‘youth’ before the fear of AIDS. Those 5 to 10 years older than me may have had a more restricted time of it. I don’t really know whether the safe sex message has been lost? Do you think it has?

*condoms. Using condors wouldn’t have been very safe!

@SusannahSophia yes condor wrangling would have been difficult. Think it might have killed the mood.
@HomeschooIerRockthemicrophone you said what I was trying to say but much better

Do you think this should be shown to teens as an education

You are welcome horse. It's a topic which is interesting from a social-history point of view, as well as art and science and psychology; because it is almost like there have been two silences: the initial silence and failure of governments to act on time and then the silence after meds came out. You then had those involved at the forefront saying just over a decade ago, that it was time to revisit the period, record it and remember those who had passed - many of whom were involved in the arts, their work has been shown again. I think it's important - especially as I said upthread, because it's not yet over. Anyone interested as to why there's no HIV vaccine, even after 40 years, link here but in short, the virus mutates quickly, hides effectively and targets the exact immune response a vaccine would try to mimic:
www.healthline.com/health/hiv-aids/vaccine-how-close-are-we#outlook

Was going to save it and watch it week by week but ended up binging today - it was an absolutely amazing piece of television

I was a teenager mid 90s and at school we did get education videos about HIV and AIDS but it was linked to the Mark Fowler storyline in Eastenders. I thought for a good few years that our school was quite ahead of its time for educating us about things like this but later realised they were only telling us half the story because of bloody section 28!

I feel so sorry for all the ‘Ritchie’s’ and ‘Colin’s’ of the world and thank good for the ‘Jill’s’ who stood up for them no matter what

Its fair to say when I came of age in the late 90s ‘safe sex’ was 90% about not getting pregnant. And any STD talk through the Noughties was about chlamydia. Maybe I just heard what I wanted to hear. I do remember though, vividly, going for an std test when I was about 25 and them offering a blood test for HIV. I accepted, but cried (bad break up followed by period of sleeping around) as it had never entered my mind as a serious risk. Came back as negative but it always stayed front of mind when future boyfriends played the aren’t you on the pill / I hate condoms line.

I think it being aired now whilst another virus is a very real and present danger, whist very different, adds to the impact.

@notawittyname1954

Do you think this should be shown to teens as an education

I think so yes. The sex scenes are graphic but done in an almost comedic way. I've suggested to ours that they watch it. It really does combine humour, tragedy and the horror of HIV and AIDS in a drama most older teens and young adults would find enjoyable (if that's the right word).

Even the perv in the shop 'is it cleeeeean' was funny but alarming as that that is obviously how abuse and exploitation can start.

I hope not Sophia (my eldest not in the UK had a teacher gifting them loads of condoms last year, bless) but I couldn't say for sure. We were teaching about safe sex two decades ago with condoms on bananas, bless. You'd never get the series shown in schools, even sixth form, without the removal of all sex scenes. That's just how it is - parents hate anything shown that's not age-restricted and you have to be so careful with so many topics. But the same kids watching Sex Education on Netflix might watch it away from Mum and Dad.

Olly's documentary on i player Growing up Gay is also worth watching

@notawittyname1954

Olly's documentary on i player Growing up Gay is also worth watching

Ah is it back on, it gets put on and off periodically

I knew nothing about HIV until after my first screening when I was given a leaflet. I had gone with a (male) friend to get checked out, hadn't even crossed my mind to get checked but he said to me "well you might as well as you're here anyway" he was gay so was getting checked. I wouldn't have got checked then if I hadn't had a gay friend, he wouldn't have got checked if he had been straight. I had been sexually active for 3 years by then. It just hadn't been bought to my attention that it was relevant to women at all really, and that was nearly 2 decades after when this was set

The Terence Higgins Trust is a good starting place for anyone interested in the advocacy and human rights issues.

Reading this thread has made me sad. And angry. As I said previously, I worked in HIV/AIDS wards in the early 90s in London. It’s one of the reasons I loved Princess Diana. She did SO MUCH away from the cameras.
But I’m sad and angry that so few people know about what happened. About the inhumanity of it.
By the early 90s I’d like to think that the majority of us working in GUM/AIDS were humane. Doing it because we wanted to. But the legacy of the healthcare that people endured before us was cruel.
I often wonder about the families. Especially the ones who burned with shame.
I’ll never forget the funerals we went to. Partners and friends delaying the start for as long as they could hoping that parents or siblings would show up. And they rarely did in those circumstances.

I binged it all today. The locked wards & burning of belongings was horrific. Those poor poor men who died alone 😭

I really thought ritchies mum had come round & was going to get Jill. Wonder if there are many parents who are haunted by the way they treated their kids

I think it's probably closer to life that she let anger and grief and guilt and shame and all that deny her son his dying wish to see his friend. It made it much more harrowing, but also I think a lot of parents would have behaved badly and regretted it later. The same with burning their belongings, not attending their funerals, not visiting them in hospital. Most people are very flawed. This was done so well in this. It left me with a Lot of discomfort and many questions and is still haunting me. Perfect use of TV. RTD has outdone himself

@SusannahSophia

Ah, I’m glad I read this thread. I binge watched it last night and episode 3 was missing and I didn’t realise. I was upset that Colin seemed to have died off camera. I’ve caught up now.

The actress in the kitchen with the squash is Ruth Sheen. She was in Misfits, Prime Suspect, Brassic etc.

You lot need to get IMDB, it’s essential for this sort of thing.

Oh my days - I've just watched episode 3 after binging (what I thought was all
of it) yesterday!

I thought I had gone mad and fallen asleep or something - it must have been a glitch 😆

@Rubidium

I really recommend this old edition of Horizon from 1982-83: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01z2lbp/horizon-19821983-killer-in-the-village It's mainly about the situation in New York, but people had just started dying of AIDS in the UK in around 1982 when this was filmed. It's easy to forget that the HIV virus wasn't identified as the cause of AIDS until about 1984, so for a few years they had no idea what was causing it. The doctors and scientists in this Horizon episode are really just fumbling around in the dark for clues.

Just starting to watch it. I was 17 and 18 and it seems so long ago, but also 5 minutes! 'The new disease'. Terrifying times

@covetingthepreciousthings

Does Colin remind anyone else of a very young Alan Partridge? Just his look.

Yes! I thought that as well.

@sundaysgirls@covetingthepreciousthings

Someone else somewhere said he looked like H from steps