I’ve mentioned It’s a Sin frequently enough that I’ve given it its own category tag as I suspect I’ll come back to it again. The series has provoked a number of memories and reflections and I’ve been trying to write them. My initial post was about Edinburgh’s difficulties in the IV drug using community, but what’s also on my mind relates to my first time at University (1977-82). It’s possible that some of that will work its way into here in time, but I’m not sure yet.
The trigger was thinking about a fellow student who died relatively young in the early eighties of ‘cancer’ and wondering, not for the first time, whether that was a euphemism. Another fellow student whom I haven’t seen since 1984, who crops up tangentially in one of my stories, is someone I hope is still with us, but I can’t be sure as I’ve lost touch with almost everyone from those years. Even now, forty years later, I’m deliberately mentioning no names.
It’s been fascinating to watch the ripples of the programme on Twitter (hashtag #ItsASin) as it reached the US and Canada and also European TV. Obviously Twitter isn’t the whole universe of comments, but what has struck me is that the overwhelming response has been positive and, in many respects, stuffed full of catharsis; the recognition of a truth being told. The negative reactions, aside from the more extreme, have also been interesting in that, more often than not, they come from deep engagement with the series. I’ve seen a number that are on the basis of several viewings of the programme.
Of the longer-form reactions I’ve enjoyed reading, this is one of the good ones:
It isn’t unusual to see hyperbole around a programme or a film, statements of its ‘importance’ and how ground-breaking it is. In the case of It’s a Sin, which has already led to a massive increase in people checking out their HIV status in the UK, I think it genuinely is ground-breaking. There will be copycat programmes no doubt, but I hope there will be others that tell other stories that wouldn’t otherwise have been told, of men and women who quietly disappeared, their lives and experiences airbrushed out of history through stigma and shame. I doubt that my fellow student who died, for example, would ever have gone clubbing to Do You Wanna Funk or Oh l’amour; he was, in my memory at least, more of a quiet evening in with a proper cup of tea and a Brahms concerto man.
I hope also that the impact of the programme internationally, together with the probable wheelbarrow load of industry awards it will attract, might give pause for thought to all the industry executives who turned the pitch for the programme down, because of the stigma and shame that is still out there and fear of what the frothing tabloids might say.
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The forecast high winds have arrived. So far so good, but we did watch a neighbour’s gutter get blown off the roof and have seen plenty of untethered objects, mainly bins, getting pummelled around.
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In news of another virus, the First Minister announced plans for a gradual easing of the current lockdown restrictions in Scotland from the first week in April. She was much more cautious about providing dates than the Prime Minister. Given what happened last year, this seems to me to be sensible. It does mean that the restrictions, in one form or another, will by then have been in place for more than a year. What is more surprising, though, is that given restrictions will still be in place, the plan is nevertheless to go ahead with the Holyrood elections in early May.
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Music : in an exciting new development, tonight’s music choice has been outsourced without competition to my daughter. She gave me a choice of four and I’ve gone for….
The Strike : Devils in the Canyon
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