A Town Called Malice – Sky Showcase

This is all about the ’80s music.  There isn’t much of a plot, but it’s worth watching for the soundtrack.  Amazing music.  However, it’s rather worrying that the hardfaced matriarch’s played by Martha Plimpton – am I the only one who thinks she’s still a teenager and going out with poor River Phoenix?

The plot, such as it is, is that a young couple from a family of London criminals accidentally kill a police officer, and run away to the Costa del Sol to live with an uncle who claims to have loads of money but hasn’t.  They then get mixed up with local criminals.  Everyone swears a lot.  The girlfriend shoots the uncle.  It’s not brilliant stuff but, as I said, it’s worth watching for the music.

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Stock Aitken Waterman: Legends of Pop – Channel 5

Back in the day, it was considered a bit uncool to like Stock Aitken Waterman songs; but everyone did anyway.   How could you not?   They were just so catchy!   The trio are probably most associated with their big hits of the late ’80s and early ’90s, working with either unknowns, like Rick Astley and Sonia, or soap actors looking to break into the music business, like Kylie and Jason.   But they worked with some big name established acts too, people like Bananarama and Donna Summer, who went to them because they admired their success.

This first episode focused on their early years, how they got together and some of their early singles.   It went into quite a lot of technical detail, which was something different, but it was largely an exercise in ’80s music nostalgia.  And, hey, I’m always up for a bit of that!  Loving this, thank you Channel 5!

Made in the 80s – Channel 4

I’m not quite sure what the first episode of this was getting at, other than annoying me immensely by referring to the Soviet Union as “Russia”.  It sounded from the blurb like a fairly positive documentary, celebrating Britain’s many contributions to the world to the 1980s.  But it was actually mostly doom and gloom.  Most of the first episode was devoted to fears of nuclear war, with interviewees ranging from Holly Johnson to women involved in the protests at Greenham Common talking about … well, fears of nuclear war.  And it was rather obsessed with Raymond Briggs, but only in the context of, you guessed it, fears of nuclear war.

It also featured The Snowman, Countdown, Margaret Thatcher doing a Saturday Superstore phone-in, a brief mention of the Falklands War, and some talk about Saatchi and Saatchi.  But most of it was, yes, about the threat of nuclear war.

It did say a few positive things about British film makers; and it praised Margaret Thatcher’s important role in improving relations between the West and the Soviet Union. But most of it was miserable.  Where was the 80s music (other than Two Tribes, which was played because it talked about the threat of war)?  Live Aid?  Royal weddings?  Sport?  Anything, you know, cheerful?!

An hour centred on the threat of nuclear war, when I was expecting pop, rock and brightly-coloured clothes.  Thanks a lot, Channel 4!!

Mill Green school stories by Alison Prince

  I read these in the 1980s, when they were first published, and suddenly felt a random yearning to read them again.  They’re written by Alison Prince, who was a scriptwriter for Trumpton.   Brief pause to recite the names of the Trumpton firemen.  OK, back to the point.  The early books were advertised as being similar to Grange Hill; and I think Armada’s reasoning was that, because of the success of Grange Hill on TV, young readers wanted school stories set at co-ed, comprehensive day schools, rather than the traditional school stories set at single sex private boarding schools.  They never quite caught on, though, which was a shame because they really weren’t bad at all.

Mill Green is a fairly new and probably fairly small (it only seems to have one form per year, although, confusingly, one book suggests that there are 800 pupils!) school in an unspecified part of the UK – I think it’s Northern England, but it doesn’t say and they aren’t many clues.  The school itself is in the middle of nowhere, with pupils travelling in by bus from nearby towns and buses.  The bus trips are a big part of the day, which was very much the case at my school but which you obviously don’t get in boarding school novels.  They focus on a group of first years, who later go into the second year, with older kids only really featuring as bullies picking on the younger kids.   A small number of teachers also feature, notably Mr Potter, our gang’s form master; and parents feature in minor roles.

The books wouldn’t win any awards for the quality of writing: the  word “said” appears umpteen times on every page.  However, the main characters are appealing, and the stories, whilst only short, make for entertaining reading.  They aren’t particularly moralising, as traditional school stories are, nor hard-hitting as some of Grange Hill’s are, but they’re strong enough to keep the reader’s attention.  Each book involves a school project/extra-curricular activity, plus a bit of a mystery.  There’s a slight feeling of the Five Find Outers about solving the crimes and mysteries.  In the first book, the school’s trying to promote gardening/farming in the grounds, and there’s an arsonist on the loose.  In the second book, the school’s putting on a pantomime, and there’s a new girl who clearly isn’t what she claims to be.  And so on.

There are only five books in total.   I enjoyed them in the 1980s and I enjoyed reading them again.   But, whilst American books set in “ordinary” schools – Judy Blume, Paula Danziger, etc – seem to go down well, these just didn’t catch on in the way that boarding school books did, and it wasn’t because of a lack of marketing by Armada.   Maybe kids in the UK just prefer reading traditional school stories.

There are five in all:

Mill Green on Fire
Mill Green on Stage
A Spy at Mill Green
Hands off Mill Green!
Rock on, Mill Green

They’re very 1980s, with a lot of the emphasis being on the technology of the time.  I don’t know what kids of the 2020s would make of that!   But they’re really not bad, as I’ve said, and it’s a shame that they never became more popular.  I’ve enjoyed revisiting them..

 

The Newsreader – BBC 2

 

It’s rather worrying that no-one under 40 will even be able to remember 1986, the year in which this series is set.  It’s also rather worrying that Madge from Neighbours featured in the second episode as a woman who remembered seeing Halley’s Comet in 1910.   Surely Madge is only in her mid-50s?!   (The actress is now 79!)   This is the first newsreader drama I’ve watched since Drop The Dead Donkey.  That was a comedy: this is more of a soap opera.  So, are nervous male lead Dale and struggling female lead Helen going to live happily ever after, or is it going to turn out that he’s gay but not out?

There hasn’t been much obvious ’80s nostalgia – not much music, and neither the hairdos nor the shoulder pads are that big! – but revisiting the main news stories of early 1986 has been interesting, and seeing how much technology’s changed since then is frightening!

The characters get your attention even if they aren’t, and presumably aren’t meant to be, very appealing.   They’ve all got things going on. It rather laboured the point about racism, sexism and homophobia in ’80s workplaces but, TBH, there *was* a lot of it around.

I’m enjoying this, and look forward to seeing where it goes.

Sherwood – BBC 1

I thought that the first episode of this was excellent, even though having someone in Nottinghamshire shot dead with a bow and arrow by someone living in a forest was a bit cheesy.  Speaking of forests, I gather that the good people of Nottinghamshire are rather narked that a character referred to “Notts Forest”, which is the equivalent of a character from Manchester referring to United as “Man U” –  i.e. just plain wrong!   But, that aside, this was really very good.

It’s set in a Nottinghamshire mining community (everything’s a “community” these days, rather than a city, town, village or suburb), and the murder victim, Gary, is a former miner who’d never got past the wounds left by the Miners’ Strike of 1984.   And we’re talking about the divisions within the community.  Just as Civil War books tend to focus on the clash between Cavaliers and Roundheads, and ignore the divisions between different groups on the Roundhead side, the narrative of the Miners’ Strike is generally that of the authorities, led by Margaret Thatcher, versus the miners, led by Arthur Scargill.   But it wasn’t that simple.

I live quite near the site of the old Agecroft Colliery, where most miners carried on working during rhe 1984 strike and flying pickets from Yorkshire gathered outside to try to stop them.   In the Ashfield area, where this is set, some miners did continue working, others went on strike, and, again, flying pickets from Yorkshire came in.  We see that Gary still, in 2022, referred to those who carried on working as “scabs”, shouting abuse at them even as they tried to enjoy a quiet drink, and that there were divisions even within his own family because his brother-in-law was one of the “scabs”.

In early 1985, whilst the strike was still going on, there was a storyline in Coronation Street in which Hilda Ogden’s lodger was discovered to have broken a strike.  His life was made a misery even though he explained that he’d felt he had to work due to family circumstances.   The view at the time was that no-one liked a scab, blackleg, strikebreaker, whatever term you want to use; but the problem with the miners’ strike was that a national strike was called without there being a national ballot.   Also, as Joanne Froggatt’s character, Sarah, pointed out, people had the right to choose what they felt was right.  The whole thing was messy.  And the memories of what happened die hard.

A lot was going on in this programme.  There was the general issue of generation gaps, as Gary’s wife Julie kept saying “There’s somebody at the door” in the Rod Hull/Emu/Grotbags way, and her grandchildren had no idea what she was talking about.  There was the fall of the red wall, with Sarah standing for the council elections as a Conservative.  At the time of the last general election, we heard a lot about former mining constituencies such as Leigh, Sedgefield and Ashfield itself voting Conservative: it really showed how much things had moved on.  But, for Gary, nothing had moved on.

There was the return to the community of a local man now a senior police officer, and the distrust of the police nearly 40 years after Orgreave and everything else that went on in 1984.  It was all brilliantly written and brilliantly acted, and I’m looking forward to the five episodes still to come.

 

Thatcher and Reagan: A Very Special Relationship – BBC 2

Those of us who grew up in the 1980s saw the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev (who comes from a village near the Russo-Ukrainian border, brought glasnost to the old USSR and must be absolutely devastated at what’s going on at the moment), Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa bestriding the world stage (I like that expression).  Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and to some extent Helmut Kohl were also part of that.

Going back into history, you find, to name but a few, Churchill, Disraeli, Gladstone, Bismarck, Metternich, Louis XIV, Elizabeth I, Charles the Bold, Henry V, Saladin, William the Conqueror, Harald Hardrada, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great … on and on and on.  Where are all the world leaders now?!   That new German Chancellor’s so anonymous that I can only remember his name because it makes me think of the snowman in Frozen, and the rest of them aren’t much better.   And how is banning Russian players from Wimbledon supposed to help anyone?  Maybe that’s why everyone’s so into Zelenskyy, because he actually *has* got something about him.

Anyway.  Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were obviously both quite controversial figures at home, but this programme wasn’t about that; and I was impressed that the BBC, which often seems to forget that it’s supposed to be politically neutral, respected that – and focused on the relationship between the two, which was what it said on the tin.

We even got some Freudian-type stuff about how Ronald liked Maggie because strong women reminded him on his mother, and how Maggie liked Ronald because she was keen on glamorous, powerful men.  That does rather make one wonder how she ended up with Denis, who was many things but certainly not glamorous, but never mind.

It’s rather frightening how dated the video shots from the ’80s and early ’90s look now, but I’m trying not to think about that.  I’m still trying to process the fact that the Miami Open was won by someone who was born in 2003, and that the defeated finalist was someone whose dad I remember as a young teenage pro.  And how on earth is Brooklyn Beckham old enough to get married, when surely it was only five minutes ago that he was an adorable toddler kicking a ball round the pitch at Old Trafford after we won the league in, er, the year 2000?  Oh, and, speaking of the ’80s and early ’90s, remember the Berlin Wall coming in November 1989, Nelson Mandela being released from prison in February 1990, and those precious few months of thinking that we’d finally reached an age of peace?   It all went kaput when Iraq invaded Kuwait in July 1990, before The Scorpions had even released “Wind of Change”, but it was nice whilst it lasted.

This first episode really was quite interesting, because there was so much about that personal bond and what helped them to form it, and how Mrs Thatcher (as she was then) coped with being a woman in a man’s world.  I’m not sure that we needed quite so much psycho-analysis about the significance of her handbag, though.  Why are people so obsessed with the Queen’s handbag and Maggie Thatcher’s handbag?!   They should see the contents of mine – talk about everything but the kitchen sink.

I wish we could get back to a point where Anglo-American relations are as close as they were then, but we don’t seem to have had another pair of leaders who’ve got on so well.  Blair and Clinton, to some extent, but both of them were very narcissistic and I don’t think that they worked together anything like as well as Thatcher and Reagan did.

Also, even with the Gulf Wars, there wasn’t the sense of the common enemy that there was in the days of the Cold War.  I never really got the Cold War, TBH.  OK, it was coming to an end by the time I was old enough to understand much about it, but I think it was because people were always talking about “the Russians”, rather than “the communists” of “the Soviets”.  I like Russia.  Not easy then and not easy at the moment, but all that Russians-as-baddies stuff has never worked for me.  But it did for Thatcher and Reagan … until Gorbachev came along, and we’ll hear more about that next week.

A lot of this was about the issue of American nuclear weapons being based in Britain, and in Western Europe, and how Thatcher and Reagan worked very closely together on that, but we also saw them having their differences over trade issues, and over the lack of overt  American support for Britain during the Falklands War.

All in all, I thought it was very well-presented.  Too many BBC programmes these days take a very biased political viewpoint, and or try to make the issues of the past about the issues of today, like that ridiculous programme in 2017 which tried to make out that the Reformation was somehow linked to Brexit, or that Simon Schama programme which tried to link William Blake to Darth Vader.  This one did what it was meant to do, and it did it rather well.

 

80s Kid by Melanie Ashfield

 

Mum and dad born at the end of the Second World War, two kids born in the mid-1970s, grandparents who made it through the Depression and the war and now hoped to enjoy their retirement in a bit of comfort which they never had when they were younger, living in the suburb of a big city.  Yep, that was us, and that was also the Ashfield family – although, in their case, the city was Birmingham.  This is only a short book, but it’s a wonderful exercise in nostalgia.  I read the entire book very quickly, nodding and laughing and saying “Oh yes”!   Especially when the author said that she herself, as a child, was always very interested in “the olden days”, because she was always busily reading about them in Enid Blyton books.

Did you collect Panini football stickers and smelly rubbers?  Wear a Fergie bow in your hair?  Tape the Top 40 off Radio 1 on a Sunday night?  Learn things from Judy Blume’s Forever and the Just Seventeen problem page which you never learnt anywhere else?   Yep, that was me, and that was also the author of this book.  It really did give me a good laugh!

It’s subtitled “A memoir of growing up in the last decade before technology took over” – and, yes, that’s true.  All right, I’m not saying that, when we were kids, we were out roaming the great outdoors, eating macaroons and drinking ginger beer, but we certainly didn’t have mobile phones, we only had basic computer games, and a Walkman was the height of sophistication!  But, as the book says, any sort of new gadget was very exciting, and people thought they were really something if they got one for their home.  The author devotes most of a chapter to the family’s first microwave.  I have no idea why I remember this, but we got our first microwave on the weekend that Tom Watson won the British Open.  So it must have been either 1982 or 1983, because he won it in both years.  And the fact that I remember that just shows what a big deal it was when your family got their first microwave!

And, as the author says, grandmas and great-aunts were not overly impressed with microwaves.  They liked to cook things properly.  Specific reference is made to lemon meringue pies.  Oh yes.  My maternal grandma was always making lemon meringue pies.  People who were not so devoted to cooking, on the other hand, served up Angel Delight.   We used to get this at primary school.  It was always the chocolate flavour.  Someone nicknamed it “mud pud”, and the name stuck.  The author writes at length about how utterly vile primary school dinners were in the 1980s.   They were indeed.

I was more interested in the primary school nostalgia than the secondary school nostalgia, probably because I was a very shy and boring teenager but, as our primary school was so small, everyone there was part of the in crowd.   She talks about it being a big deal when one black kid arrived at the school, but I have to say that that didn’t resonate with me, because my primary school was always very multi-ethnic.  Other things did resonate with me, though.  Having to go to school even in the bleak midwinter.  If you slipped in the snow, hard luck!   And picking up the litter in the playground being regarded as a mark of high status rather than as a punishment.  I’d completely forgotten about that, but it was true!   There was a girl in the year below me called Claire, and Claire was obsessed with being one of the people chosen to pick up the litter in the playground!   I was never that keen on it myself, but I’d never have got a look in anyway, because Claire and her mates were always in there first, so excited about getting to pick up crisp packets left lying on the ground.  I mean, why??

And the collections.  Rubbers.  We had two huge sweet jars full of rubbers.  Being a rather anal kid obsessed with record-keeping, I kept a list of rubbers, and every new rubber which my sister and I acquired was entered on to the list.  I am not making this up.  Panini football stickers, of course.   Care Bears.  And My Little Ponies.  We even had a My Little Pony game at our primary school.  Girls only.  Each girl was assigned the name of one of the ponies.  I was Applejack.  My sister was Seashell.  My then best friend was Bubbles.  No, I have no idea why I remember this, either.

Dads and grandads, meanwhile, dreamed of winning the pools.  The author writes quite a bit of this.  Our pools man came once a week, to collect the money.  My dad put on the same numbers every week, and, to this day, I can still remember most of them.  My maternal grandad, meanwhile, always talked about how, when he won the pools, he was going to buy two racehorses.  He’d even chosen names for them.  Needless to say, he never did win the pools.  Nor did anyone in the author’s family.  But we had our dreams!

Another chapter is devoted to Wimpy parties.  Now, I don’t remember ever going to a Wimpy party, but Wimpy parties and McDonald’s parties were much the same thing, and McDonald’s parties were really big round our way in around 1984.  I had one myself.  You and your friends all went to the local McDonald’s, and the staff even organised games for you.  And it meant that your mum was not left with a load of mess to  clear up at home.   So cool!  *So* cool!

Less cool were those mental arithmetic tests with which some teachers were obsessed.  I’m so glad to learn that this didn’t just happen at our school!   Our headmistress used to yell “Right, mental arithmetic test, number down 1 to 100,” and then fire questions at us so quickly that you were usually still trying to work out the answer to question 1 when she was on to question 3.  These days, it’s probably all computerised.

There were all sorts of other bits, too.  Mr Frosty machines.  Monogrammed hankies!   Fergie bows.  Watching Bullseye.   And then all the things you did at secondary school.  As I said, I didn’t get as much from this, because I was a bit of a saddo at secondary school, but plenty of it was still very familiar.  Fake IDs.  I’m not sure how it worked elsewhere, but, in Manchester, there were under 16 bus passes and 16-19 bus passes.  Kids aged 13, 14 and 15 would photocopy their birth certificates, change the date with Tippex to make it look as if they were 18, photocopy the copy, and then get a 16-19 bus pass.  The staff at the bus station shops must have known jolly well that the said kids were nowhere near 18, but I don’t remember anyone ever being questioned about it.

Forever, by Judy Blume.  Yes, we all read that.  To this day, I find it very hard not to snigger if I meet anyone called Ralph.  There are very few people under 50 called Ralph, despite the fact that it was the name of the hero of The Thorn Birds.  I think Judy Blume killed the name off.  The Just Seventeen problem page.  The constant fad diets – generally tried by mums and aunties.

And, according to the author, a lot of girls wanted to be models.  Now, I remember Aveline in Bread and Georgina in Grange Hill both wanting to be models, but I think that that particular trend must have passed my school by.  OK, a fat kid like me was never going to aspire to be a model anyway, but I don’t remember any of the pretty girls being interested in modelling either!

Taping the Top 40 off the radio, though – now that was something which we definitely did.  The snag was that, unless you had a fancy combined radio and cassette thing, those old cassette players recorded everything, and you could guarantee that a parent or sibling would barge into your room and start talking just as your favourite song came on!  Video rental shops were a big thing too.  My then best friend’s parents actually owned a video rental shop, so we got the pick of all the newest videos.  And hanging around in town on Saturday mornings.  I think calling the city centre “town” is a specifically Mancunian thing, and the author just talked about hanging around in the city centre, but, yes, everyone did that!   These days, people go into town to have a drink and something to eat, but, back then, there weren’t anything like the number of eating places that there are now.  And we didn’t go shopping.  We just hung around.

I suppose everyone thinks that the decade in which they grew up was something special.  It’s where you get your soundtrack from, as well.  I can hear a song from 1989 and know exactly when it was from, and what was going on in my life at that time.  With songs which were released later than … probably 1995, the year I graduated from university, I just haven’t got that.  I rarely listen to any music from any time later than the mid-1990s.  Because the time when you grow up’s special.  We’ll always be 80s kids.

Loved this book!   Really, really loved it!

 

Children’s TV nostalgia

I share my birthday with Mr Benn.  Well, sort of.  He first appeared on our TV screens on February 25th, 1971, so he’s just celebrated his 50th anniversary, on the same day as I sort-of-celebrated my birthday.  I’m younger than him, so he’ll get his Covid vaccination before me.  Yes, my brain really did bizarrely come up with that thought.  Anyway, this all got me thinking about the TV programmes we used to watch when we were little kids.  We were still watching some of them when we were big kids.  It was totally uncool to watch Play School or Rainbow once you were past about 6, but most people in my class at secondary school were still watching Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds when we were more like 14.

Mr Benn was more a programme for little kids, though.  So was Bod.  And the Mr Men and Little Miss programmes.  These were animated programmes, so there were no actual human presenters them, which was pretty cool because presenters were grown-ups.  Dastardly and Muttley used to be on just after school, and He-Man and She-Ra were also really big whilst I was at primary school.  Some of them were really ’80s – The Mysterious Cities of Gold was another, as was Pigeon Street, and then there was Danger Mouse, and Inspector Gadget, and Batfink, and Around The World With Willy Fogg – but there were classics like The Flintstones and Scooby Doo as well.  Pigeon Street was really feminist, because Long Distance Clara was a female lorry driver!   Oh, and there was Willo The Wisp as well.  I loved Mavis Cruet.  Most fairies were thin.  I really appreciated the fact that there was a fat fairy!

And The Raccoons was on at weekends.  I think it was actually on as part of those Saturday morning kids’ TV shows.  Tiswas was a bit early for me, and I never really got Swap Shop, but I liked Going Live and Number 73, and, although I was a bit old for kids’ TV by then, I watched The 8:15 From Manchester because it had “Manchester” in the title.  In the holidays, there was Wac-a-Day.  We’re wide awake!  Mallett’s Mallet.

Of the programmes with adult presenters, The Sooty Show and Emu’s World were very popular in our house.  We had Sooty, Sweep and Soo puppets.  We were never really into Jackanory, and only watched Crackerjack occasionally, although I still laugh whenever anyone says “Ooh, I could crush a grape”.  For reason, we never really got into Blue Peter either.  We weren’t that into programmes with presenters.

We watched Grange Hill, and a short-lived ITV school series called Behind the Bike Sheds.  And T-Bag.  And, when we were very young, we watched Bagpuss.

There were some programmes we watched at school as well.  Mainly in the third year infants.  I don’t know why, but for some reason I remember that as being the year of watching TV in the classroom.  Zig Zag did history programmes.  I can’t remember much about You and Me, except the theme tune went “You and Me, Me and You …” and some of the boys in the class would sing “Poo and Wee, Wee and Poo”, much to the teacher’s annoyance.  And there was Why Don’t You.

I’m going to remember a million other programmes as soon as I post this.  We really do seem to have spent a worrying amount of our childhoods watching TV 🙂 .

A lot of them had very catchy theme tunes.  The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Dogtanian, Pigeon Street, He-Man … most people who grew up in the ’80s can still sing those theme tunes, which is rather embarrassing.  And know the words to the Wac-a-Day song, but possibly won’t admit it.  They stick in your head and never leave it!   And which TV programmes you watched as a kid really do mark out which generation you belong to!   You can read older books, or play older games, but you can only watch what’s on TV at the time!   There were no nostalgia channels in our day.

So happy 50th anniversary to Mr Benn, and I’m now off to think of all the programmes I’ve missed out.

 

 

 

 

It’s A Sin – Channel 4

I’m fairly sure that this is the first TV series to be named after a Pet Shop Boys song.  I’d assumed that “It’s A Sin” was going to be the theme tune, but, disappointingly, it wasn’t – although we did get plenty of other amazing ’80s music throughout this first episode.  More to the point, it’s, rather strangely, the first British drama series to focus on the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s.

Unlike Philadelphia and the Mark Fowler EastEnders storyline in the early ’90s, this didn’t start with someone having already been diagnosed with HIV and or AIDS, but with four young gay lads leaving home to start new lives in London, in 1981.  All hopes and dreams, bright lights and parties, pubs and clubs.  Well, for three of them, Ritchie, Roscoe and Ash, along with their friend Jill, anyway.  The fourth lad, Colin, was shy and quiet and sat in watching TV.  I’m glad that Colin was there.  Not everyone can be confident and outgoing.

And it was good fun: they had good fun.  It was much lighter than I’d expected it to be.  I knew that there was a storyline involving a confrontation between Roscoe and his homophobic religious family and I was expecting something like the very emotional scene in Pose which saw Damon being physically thrown out of the house by his stepfather and having to sleep on a park bench.  Instead, Roscoe just told them where to shove it, and was next seen having a wonderful time partying the night away in gay bars, going through one bloke after the other.

Sadly, there are probably more Damons than Roscoes, but Russell T Davies has spoken very movingly of wanting those who died of AIDS to be remembered for the joy of their lives and not just for the tragedy of their deaths, and also of wanting to pay tribute to the friends, relatives, medical staff and activists who supported them.

Boys just wanna have fun … and it’s all so poignant, because we know what lies ahead, and we know that some of these young lads are not even going to see their 30th birthdays, and that those who do are going to be mourning the loss of some of the people closest to them.  Towards the end of the first episode, Colin’s colleague was hospitalised with a mysterious illness … and, as soon as we saw the lesion on his face, we knew what it was.  But, in (by then) 1982 none of them had any idea.  Then he died.

In the next episode, we’re – ironically, given that this was filmed before the Covid-19 pandemic –  going to see how some of the characters refuse to believe that AIDS exists, and think that it’s a bizarre rumour spread by homophobic sections of the media, or else think that it’s been released deliberately by a Soviet laboratory.  Russell T Davies has talked about people trying to raise awareness being thrown out of gay pubs and told to take their leaflets with them.  It’s difficult to accept that there’s a deadly disease out there.  Until you start hearing about people dying from it.

Speaking of filming, most of it was filmed in Manchester, Bolton and Darwen, and it’s co-produced by Nicola Shindler from Whitefield.  There – that’s got my local plugs in!   We will apparently see the characters walking round a shopping centre in Eccles.  I know that people really need to know that.

The series starts in 1981, the year of the first death from AIDS in the UK. I was only 6 in 1981, and I can’t actually remember when I first became aware that HIV and AIDS existed.  We saw a character reading a newspaper article about a “mysterious illness” with no name.  That was in September 1982.   HIV wasn’t even identified until 1983.  But I do remember exactly when I first became aware of just how serious the AIDS situation had become, and that was in the summer of 1985.  Rock Hudson had pulled out of Dynasty due to ill-health, and, after it’d initially been given out that he had liver cancer, it was announced that he had AIDS.

He sadly died a few months later, aged 59.  As ever, a story about a big name celeb made a lot more headlines than a story involving ordinary people, but it was quite a pivotal moment, because he was the first really famous person to say that he had AIDS.  My friends and I were absolutely obsessed with Dynasty at the time, and older people obviously knew him as one of the world’s leading film stars, and it did raise awareness of what was happening.  What it couldn’t do, at that stage, was change attitudes and educate people.

In fact, there was quite a lot of controversy, because his character had snogged Krystle Carrington, and people were genuinely concerned that he might have infected Linda Evans, who’d been unaware of his condition.  When you think that we’ve spent most of the last year being told not to get within 6 feet of anyone who’s not in our household/bubble, those fears in 1985 don’t seem as strange as they would have done a couple of years ago.  At that time, even medical professionals were saying that it was inadvisable to kiss – as in full-scale kiss, not a peck on the cheek – someone who was HIV positive.  Most people didn’t believe some of the wilder scare stories, that you could catch it from toilet seats and that sort of thing, but there was a lot of scaremongering going on.

That was 1985. By late 1986/early 1987, everything had changed: it seemed as if everyone was talking about HIV and AIDS.  There was the big government campaign, with the pictures of tombstones.  It was horrible, but it did frighten people into being more careful and that will have saved a lot of lives.  “Hands, face, space,” sounds like something you chant during a nursery school game.  “AIDS: don’t die of ignorance” scares the hell out of you.

And the famous pictures of the Princess of Wales opening an AIDS hospice, and hugging and shaking hands with patients without wearing gloves, did a lot to dispel fears that you could catch it just from casual contact.  But there were still people who thought you could.  The Mark Fowler storyline in EastEnders, in 1990, probably did more to educate people in the UK than anything else did, because it went into so much detail.  Like a lot of people who were teenagers at the time, I certainly learnt more about HIV and AIDS from Mark Fowler than I did from any other source.

EastEnders were, as well as educating people about HIV and AIDS, making the point that anyone could catch it.  The character of Mark wasn’t in any of the high risk groups.  It was difficult: if they’d done the storyline with a gay character, people would have said that they were going along with the idea that it only affected gay men, and they were trying to avoid that … but it’s odd that, even now, none of the British soaps have “done” a storyline in which a gay male character’s been diagnosed with HIV.

Tony Warren, the late creator of Coronation Street, did address the AIDS pandemic in his novel The Lights of Manchester, though.  I read that in 1992.  A gay man moves from Manchester to San Francisco, and is gloriously happy there because he feels a sense of belonging in a city with such a big gay community. Some years later, he comes home for a visit and tells his best friend that his address book’s now full of crossings out, that there are hardly any names left on some pages, and that it’s pure good luck that he hasn’t contracted HIV himself: he hadn’t been careful because, at the time, he hadn’t known that he needed to be.  It’s a shame that that never made it on to TV: it was a very powerful conversation.

Then, in 1993, Tom Hanks won the Best Actor award for Philadelphia; and that was how far things had come.  Going back to 1986, we’d had James Anderton, the infamous “God’s Cop” Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, saying some really horrendous things about people who had AIDS.  Graham Stringer, who’s now an MP but was then the leader of Manchester City Council, had a right go at him.  By 1993, I don’t think a public figure would have said what Anderton did … but even then, when Arthur Ashe died, having contracted HIV from a blood transfusion, remarks were made about how he was a victim, in a way that someone who’d contracted it from sexual contract or shared drugs needles wasn’t.  Did Philadelphia, in which we saw characters expressing those attitudes even as they saw the Tom Hanks character suffering, help to change opinions?

The power of books, films and TV.  And music.  I was supposed to be seeing the Pet Shop Boys at the Manchester Arena last May.  The concert was rescheduled for this May, which, at the time, seemed like light years away: the pandemic was going to be over and done with by Christmas.  Yeah, right.  I don’t think It’s A Sin was ever meant as a campaigning song, but Red Letter Day must have been.  And Jimmy Somerville’s Read My Lips (Enough is Enough) actually demanded more help for HIV/AIDS patients.  The first episode ended with Smalltown Boy.  Do people who weren’t ancient enough to have been around in the ’80s and ’90s know these songs?   And was that Juliet Bravo that they were watching on TV in one episode?

Yes.  The power of TV.  I hope that this series achieves what Russell T Davies wants.  It’s been 40 years since the first death from AIDS in the UK, and a series like this is long overdue.