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. 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). This was not true of the small-screen culture that formed Russell T Davies and his peers. 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.
In modern free-to-view drama, morgue scenes outnumber bedroom scenes. It’s a subject from which many of his contemporaries seem surprisingly disengaged.
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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. 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. 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.”
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(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. In his 2009 Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood: Children of Earth, aliens arrive and insist that humanity hands over 10% of its children. The characters of his recent dystopian drama Years and Yearsknew that their lives were becoming less dystopian when the populist Prime Minister was packed off to jail and the BBC restored to public ownership. More from this author The painful truth about goutĭavies’s work also expresses a coherent political view: critical of the state but supportive of liberal institutions. 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 is a writer in the tradition of Victoria Wood and Tony Warren, creator of Coronation Street. 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. 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. Ritchie is the protagonist of Russell T Davies’s new Channel Four drama, It’s a Sin, which airs tonight at 9pm. 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. It could’ve come from God, or the jungle, or a secret laboratory, or Russia. Some people think it’s caused by sniffing poppers others that it arrived from outer space on a comet. He calls out a list of rum-sounding aetiologies. Should Ritchie Tozer be worried about his health? No, he says, because the information circulating about this virus is bunk. And he’s breaking television’s fourth wall by giving a lecture to camera on viral epidemiology. It’s strange to see a student standing in the pub right now.
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