 Yn ymgyrch yn bwysig, brwyster, yn bwysig â'r yrhaid, dominance i'r yrhaid yw.. Yn ymgyrch yn bwysig. Yn ymgyrch, yn ymgyrch yn bwysig â'r yrhaid yw ymgyrch yn bwysig ac i ryw peth gwallo'u gynnŷ yn ei hwnnw am lywododau, g ar gyfer gwaith ddiwethaf a lwythgaeth ein bydd yn ei achos ac ni'n fwy fydd yn bwysig ar gael ymgyrch neu'n gwertho'u wasud am ymgyrch. Haswn ein cryflow am bobl ond, Ca feels have a voice for the value of literature and helping people to engage with it. Tonight we are helping people to engage with it, and engaging with it ourselves in partnership with our friends at the British Library and BBC Radio 3 We are with them welcoming lifelong friends Russell T Davies and Jill Nolder, who will be joined on stage by Sabina Dosani and Matthew Sweet. There'll be discussing its' a sin and other depictions of the AIDS crisis in literature on stage and on screen. Tonite's conversation will explore how best to tell your own story and how to celebrate and commemorate those who no longer can. As you can see from this beautiful logo here, very beautiful, this event is part of our literature matters series. So our speakers will be reflecting on the importance o literature in their lives as well. Literature Matters events are intimate and wide-ranging discussions between some of the finest writers and thinkers working today. Our last literature matters event was here at the British Library again and it was with Elmando, Ianucci and Marina Hyde earlier this year. Next up, we've got an online event exclusively for our members and digital events pass holders with Zoe Ashton and Adhu Aando, which if you have signed up as a member of the RSL or a pass holder, you can get straight into your inboxes on the 19th of December. Our memberships and passes start at £25 a year. There couldn't be a better time to join the RSL because we'll be announcing our new season of events in January. And we also have a magazine, not this magazine, but a brand new version of this magazine going out in the next couple of weeks. So if you sign up as a member, you'll get that hot off the presses. For those of you with us in person this evening tonight, please stick around for your chance to buy a signed copy of Jill's wonderful memoir, Love from the Pink Palace. For everyone watching online, you can also select the bookshop button, which is, I think, in the top corner. Top corner? Yes, top corner. Thank you so much to our volunteers this evening, to the British Library and to Unique Media, who are making it possible for everybody to watch online, and of course to Radio 3, who will be broadcasting this event on Free Thinking later in the week than on their Arts and Ideas podcast. Big promises, arts and ideas. Right, back to here and now. I'm very pleased to be introducing our chair for this evening, Matthew Sweet, before he introduces our speakers. Matthew's a writer, journalist and broadcaster, hosting BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking and Sound of Cinema. His books include Operation Chaos, Sheperton Babylon, The West End Front, and Inventing the Victorians. Please welcome him on stage with me. Good evening. Good evening. Welcome to the British Library and welcome. So I'll ask you to do that and you can do that when they come on. Tonight I need that kind of special raucous third program vibe from you all. Tonight we're going to be, we're doing an event for the Royal Society of Literature, but we are also on Radio 3 on Thursday night doing an edition of Free Thinking, and this is what we're doing tonight, Free Thinking is Radio 3's flagship Arts and Ideas program. Flagship goes out before all the others. So it's a big responsibility frankly and I hope we're all up for it because we need contributions from you, we need questions from you, and also I might ask you to help me make the introduction to the podcast version of this episode, which means that you will have a line which I'll tell you about later on. But we need to do it now so let's get our guests on to the show. Jill Nolder, Russell Z. Davis and Sabina Zasani. Right, shall I introduce, do we want more applause at the beginning? I'm asking them I produce a talk well over in the corner. No, he's got that, he's got that, so we can now make a radio program together. Art is good at remembering the fallen, depending on how they fall, the dead of the Great War, battalions of them still marching through culture. What about the 50 to 100 million killed by the 1918 pandemic? Barely a mention of them. Two weeks before WB8 wrote the second coming, he'd narrowly avoided being widowed by that virus. But we don't usually think of it as the controlling moon of his blood-dimmed tide. Perhaps when it comes to death, art prefers the bullet and the bayonet to the kidney dish and the spittoon. Something must have changed, though, because there is, in our age, a new literature of pandemic. In the year of lockdowns, though, the most significant drama about a virus was on TV, and it wasn't about COVID. AIDS is now well understood and controlled, but the Channel 4 series, It's a Sin, was set before that knowledge had been acquired. And it was a kind of reckoning with those years of ignorance, not just the medical kind. It followed a small group of friends in 1980s London, and though it followed them to the grave, it was a work of joy, as well as of pain. And it's at the heart of this edition of Free Thinking. It's a Sin is created by Russell T. Davis, the man who made queerest folk years and years, regenerated Doctor Who and made the word showrunner a thing in British television. But many of its details and the character of the heroine, Jill, were drawn from the experiences of his friend, the actor and campaigner, Jill Nolder, who's now produced her own first-hand account called Love from the Pink Palace. And here they both are on the stage at the British Library, where Radio 3 is the guest of the Royal Society of Literature. We've got a third guest, too, and the audience here can see her, but the listeners don't yet know who she is. I'm going to bring her into the conversation a little later. This is called drama, Russell, isn't it? Exactly. I'm learning. So can I ask you, Russell, what emotions guided you as you wrote this series? Oh, powerful emotions, actually. I found it very exhausting to write and a bit of shame that I haven't gone through it sooner, I think. And the importance that no other drama I'll ever write will ever have. I'm very aware of that. I mean, I don't want an emotion that is important. I'm not an emotion, but a heavy weight, actually. Because if I got it wrong, that would have been it for any dramas about AIDS or HIV in the 1980s, and it's a subject on which you can get things very wrong. And more than that, if I got it wrong, it would have upset an awful lot of people who were there and who have lost people through that. So a tremendous weight of responsibility came with it. And why did it take you so long? Because I have a feeling we should declare something. We have known each other rather a long time, and I seem to remember... I mean, I can't really remember a time when I didn't kind of know that you had this in your mind. Yes, that's true. I've been talking about it for a very long time. I'm glad I waited such a long time. I've got to say I think things matured in here. I got a perspective on it, and finding ways to tell it was hard, because there's some very obvious and very sad ways to tell it, and I didn't want to do that. I think life is busy as well. It's as simple as that. I will die before I get to write everything I want to write. Sorry, don't be upset. No reaction. But in some parallel universe, you could have done this in 1999. It could have been part of the circuit of... I was very much aware of it ticking away. Actually, you look at all... I've done gay dramas for a better phrase. Actually, I love that phrase. I've done gay dramas for many years. Death haunts every single one of them. I was kind of looking at that. There's a very shocking death in Queerysfolk after a one-night stand. This is a very sudden death in Cucumber after during a one-night stand. I was kind of looking at myself and going, why do you keep doing this then in an age when we're told not to bury your gaze as a trope? I thought, look, it's rising up. It's rising at the death of the gay man. He's always there and is rising up in what you write. And I'm glad I did that. I'm glad that process took its time. But it was telling me. The work itself was telling me it's about time we got on with this. And why did you use the experiences of your friend, Jill Naldo, sitting next to you here, rather than use your own experiences as the guiding... Yes, I mean, I've lost friends. It's all in there. But Jill was much more of an activist than I was. In the years I've been listening to you talk about stuff, and not just the dark stuff, but the jokes that we tell, the anecdotes, the legends, everything I think I've ever heard about age and HIV in my life was put, was crammed into that script. You throw away lines like the rumour that there was a production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in which all seven brothers died, which we found funny. We did find funny and salacious and exotic in a way. You don't have to look at that and think that's awful. I have no idea whether that's true. I don't think it is true. I don't think it can be true, but is it true? I think it is true. But again, it's one of those things that we do, because that was an American production. And we used to hear all kinds of fearful things about how bad it was. It was one of the legends crossing... Exactly. So Jill Naldo, your friend Russell has taken your friendship. He's fictionalised you. He's cast you, in a way, as your own mother, as well in this drama. How did he put this to you? Well, that is a good question, because he's been creeping up on us. Like he said, he's had the idea for a very long time. He's often said, I want to write something to commemorate the boys. You know, and I'm going to do that. I didn't really realise how it was going to, what the actual final project was going to be. And I didn't realise it was going to get all the publicity and the way the accolades and everything it had until you were on Loose Women. And you mentioned my name. And then all of a sudden it became like this thing that's growing and growing. But again, to go to your original question, it was something that was materialising for many years. You know it's happening for real if it's on Loose Women. You really do know it's happening. And once he said, my friend Jill, and it was actually Denise Welsh who mentioned it as well. And from that moment on, it seemed to have a life of its own really, as far as I was concerned. It's strange that we've known each other since we were 14 in the same youth theatre together. Do you remember meeting? I don't remember meeting him for the first time. Well, I don't actually remember the exact moment of meeting him. I have to say, but I do remember a lot of, I remember your personality on the youth theatre because he's always had this big personality. He always has taken control and he's always been a very, not in a bad way, not in a bad way. You have your say, Jill. Loud and calm. That I remember very well. I don't remember the moment we actually met, but I do remember your... She was significantly older than me as well. Somehow I knew he was going to throw that out. And you've given your own account of the story behind the story, as it were, in love from the Pink Palace, your memoir. Is this because you've been asked about what parts of it's a sin are informed by your experiences and which aren't? It was actually because I was called by a publisher to ask to do it and I thought that's really quite mad now because I really didn't think that that was going to be a possibility from me. I thought who's ever going to want that in the real truth. And then my agent was quite keen for me to do, you know, to take that on board and to do it. And then I was persuaded by a few friends who said it's important to do it because it's a piece of history. And then I felt sort of like you said, actually, Russell, a bit of a responsibility because it's about the boys and I thought I could write about the boys, perhaps not too much about me. And then they kept saying you've got to do it from your own point of view and I got persuaded really to be fair. The boys themselves, which we see on screen in It's a Sin, it's this flat, it's a sort of hub of all of these friendships that is a real place and it was pink. It's absolutely real it was really pink. It wasn't in the TV series. No we toned it down, you always have to tone down real life that. Because it was too pink for words. It had a pink carpet, a huge pink drain-off sofa. It was actually plush. You'd never make it plush on screen Hynny'n effaith yn fawr o bwyl effaith, autobiogwr yn gwbod nhw sefydlu fanchau a gwneud ei wneud mewn gwahaniaeth. Maen nhw'n ei fyw pethau yn gweithio'n ei wneud. Yn amgylchedd ar hynny, byddwn i'n teimlo. Mae'n bywch yn gyffredin ar hynny. yn gyfrifio a'r broblemau i gael, ac rydyn ni wedi yn ei bobl gwneudio'n fwn awr i'r pwylltau. condensed milk for lambeth, and it is an MP for lambeth or linked with that, was keen to have a rainbow plaque outside the pink palace. I told the other members of the pink palace that lived there, and we thought that would be a fantastic amazing thing. I don't know if that will ever happen. As we watch, it's a sin, we might find ourselves asking, why is this woman at the centre of the story, this woman who is kind and loyal, mae'n oesio bod yn eich amgylcheddant i fod yn ôl. A mae unrhywethaf y cwestiwn ymnwys chi ddweud yr ystyried ar gynnig o'r gael? Gan hyn ymwys i gael, ac nid yn hynny'r lleidol. Dw i ddim yn gallu gynnig o'r rhai, ac nid yn oed yn iawn ei wedi gofio ymgynnu o garysg aniau am y rhai, oedda i'r llyff o'r hynny, rhaid i'r tro�w sylfa ar gyfer o'u myfwyr, ac rhaid i'r hyn nhw, ydw i'n lleidol i'r llyffion. Yes, it was a fear. You knew, once somebody fell sick, that they were not going to survive this. So, you felt like you were on a short time to make the most of our lives together in the way we had it. Don't know, the true answer. I just think it was our world and was our family. Did AIDS become, in a way, the antagonist of your life? At that point. I think it just became all consuming, it was a very powerful thing, it was out there all the time, people talked about it all the time, that you have a line that you wrote that Ritchie says, don't worry, I know all about it, it's all we talk about. So it became the thing that you couldn't avoid, really. Ritchie is the protagonist of It's a Sin, in love with The Pink Palace you tell the stories of the boys who he stands for. this is your story but it's also a biography of one of those friends of yours, the actor Dursle Redd gallwch eich ymweld tr�wysio i'w argyrchu byddwch yma yw'r hyn yngwysiat yw'r hyn? Beth hynny'n bwysig oherwydd y cyflwyso hanesdd y cyflwyso hynny er mwyn fwy yn gweithio, fe iddai gyda'ch gwasanaeth gyda'ch yn gweithio, fe efallai efallai mae yma'n gweithio efallai fe ddim yn gweithio a dog y mae'n gallu hunanol, ac mae yw'r ffordd o'r gwneud yma chyrwbeth hynny fel gyllideboli ac eu cyflwyso ar y gwaith ac y dyfodol. iawn. Felly, rydyn ni wedi'u gweithio i London ar 16 yma, a rydyn ni wedi'u gweithio i London yn ymgweithio'r yma. Rydyn ni wedi'u gweithio arllunio gael i'r awl i wneud. Rydyn ni wedi'u gweithio'n sioedd, i'u gweithio'r ffordd, ac yn ddod o'r ffilm yn chi'n ddifoedig ymweld, a rydyn ni wedi'u gweithio'r awl ar y gweithio'r 25 o 26 yma, ac rydyn ni wedi'u ddiagnodd ar Eidol. ac ond, gallwn ftakir y bydd ymlaen, maen nhw'n ei hoffa'r ysgrifennig yw'r perth i'ch sgwrdd, ac yn gymryd i'w ddweud. Felly, mae'n gwneud o'r ysgrifennig yr ydw ienderliolaethau ac mae fath gydgofydd yn morhefion o'r rhannu arall o'r wneud, yn cydweithio i'r cyhoedd, ac mae'n yn rhan o'i beeib, dwi'n rhan i'n defnyddio i'r methau ac roedd hynny'n arddangos, mae hyn美國i, Felly, mae'n ei ddweud, mae hynny'n galwch yn ei oedda chi. Mae'n sahol yng nghyd i fy tyd. Rwy'n oedda i fy ystod, eio'i gweithio, roi, roi, roi, roi, roi, roi, roi. Roedd mae'n gweithio gyda chi, mae'n bod hi'n gweithio, mae mae'n cymdeithio cyllid yn y mawr yn gweithio. A mae'n roi ddaf. Btwch yma, mae'r ysgrin gennym gweithio arnynni. Mae ein bod yn maen i'r gael ardal o'i cerddur. wnaeth y fath am ymdegwyr wedi'u arweithio, y fathrwyr o'r teimlo gydaill gyda'i ymddegwr fel Llwyr, na sy'n fy rpmiau iddynt i'r llwyr. Mae'r dweud hefyd yn bwysig ymdegwyr y wneud rwy'i adnonellau gyda'r ddaeth. Felly, dyna'n cymdeithasio dda i fynd i'r hyn sy'n bod ymdegwyr. Felly, efallai rhan o'r pethau tain any trofyddion yma, esfon o ddan nhw'n gyrgyrchu yn Dursley-McLinald. Nid ydych chi gwybod arnyn ni hyn! Dyna'r gwneud yma'r bod yn yma, i-gwylio'r holl ac yn ymddech chi'n unig o'ch popcoon, yn ychwanegwyr cyllidau. Fafbulous. Dyna'r bod ni'n cyfnod i'r fan, a'n dweud o'ch cynnig o'ch cynnig. Gallwn ni'n dwy'n dweud o'r cysylltu'r cyllidau, felly e'n dweud o'ch cysylltu'r cyllidau, a'r cyllidau'r cyllidau, a'r cyllidau'r ddorihello, yn anhygoel i'r holl ymddangos i'r Dori Bryyn,yd oedd ddoe'n ei roi, ddylai ddor Bond. A rywbeth ddor O'Bryan. Chydyn ni'n cymdeithas. Mae ni oed o bwysig ddor o'b bryan. Ac mae hyn yn iddi y gallu gwahanol. Mae roi gofynnodd eich cyfnodeoli gyda'r carattwrau, elwydd rydw i'i gydig. Russell, gan yno ei wneud gilydd gyda'r newyddionol wrth gwrs o'r cydweithiau? Mae'n meddwl i'r hawl, mae'r gwneud o'r newyddion. Ond mae'r gwneud o bryan, Cymru yn y ddiogel iddyn nhw i'n ddymarth gallu eisiau, gan hynny'n hi fyddwyr i gael y sydd arherwydd ddano y peir? Yn mynd i'n fyrlé, nad oedd yng Nghymru yn ei ffrindwyr o'i mynd i'r dyfodol, wedi bod yn meddwl yn y fan hyfforddiadau. Fel ddiogel yn y rhaniedd a'r ffyrdd, mae'r ychwanegau o gynllenodd. Mae'r ffriendly yn y cyd-dyf yn ymdrasill wedi'i wneud mae'r llwydd yma'r ysgol oesmial yn y gwanfod. Maen nhw'n adeu'r amser yn ddigbyn o gyngor hyn gyda'r adeithas yn gweithio i'r gweithio. Mae'n tra iawn. Mae wneud enw i fynd, yn cymdeithas! A mi yn dweud i amser respectedei으로 i chi. Mae oedd yn ceisio i sicrhau. Mae'r drawer ar y swydd H.I.B.wysig ti'n amser, mae'n ddechrau i chi, a dwi'n ddarparu ymddangos, ac yn y man yn teimlo i chi. Wrth gwrth i ddiweddol iawn, ac mae'n gweithio i'r ddiweddol i'r sloedd dda i'w ddechrau'r oed yn awddiant. That's one of the things that took a long time to wrestle with. It's by no mean the first person to write it, and I won't be the last person. And I spent a long time wondering why audiences weren't flocking to this material. Because it's such a strong story, so extraordinary, and yet we're not drawn to it, because it's so tough, because it's about people dying young. I look to do you and I thought you're how I understand it in many ways and so that's what I should put on the page. And what has it been to you Jill to have this disease and its victims and your friends to be so much part of the structure of your life? Can you in a way imagine your life without the incursion of this disease into it? No, no, absolutely not now because it becomes especially since all the reactivation of interest and everything since it's a sin. But also it makes you who you are, what you go through at any age makes you who and what you become in the world that we live in and it's all part and parcel of. I think it's a strange thing saying why did it take me so long to write. I think for me you have to get to a certain age to realise it's the only life we've ever lived. We haven't had another one and we've only known it when we were 18 when it came along. So we've only known it with this virus and when you see the world progressing you see generations growing up without it. It takes a while to go oh there's a life without it. Yes and I didn't even you don't even realise how how little people knew about it. That's that's the quite shocking thing. I really didn't realise that is shocking because you just think that you are part of it. When you go to every HIV fundraiser and dinner and march you tend to stand there saying well where is everyone? Why doesn't everyone come to these and when the programme is transmitted you realise oh yeah really everyone doesn't come to these. There really are people not paying attention to this and I mean the gay community as well. Yes and you have people actually not looking away from this. Yes and you have people come to you that live through it as you know older people who say where was I? I didn't realise all this was going on. Yes that's amazing isn't it? Yes it's unbelievable because the next thing actually touches you. I mean and obviously you hear about illnesses that are rare illnesses and who pays an interest in them until somebody teaches you about it. The people that are affected in an immediate circle that becomes a focal point of their lives. And so it became a focal point of our lives. A lot of people in West End theatre in industries, fashion, all kinds of industries where there was a population that was being affected all the time. So I think that's the truth of it. This is free thinking on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds with me Matthew Sweet. We're at the British Library for this programme and are the guests of the Royal Society of Literature. Proving you can fit three cultural institutions into the same space. I'm going to say four I think because Russell T. Davis is sitting here too and the writer and actor Jill Nolder. I'm sure you're on your way there. But I want to bring in another voice now. She's been waiting patiently here. It's the interdisciplinary researcher and practising psychiatrist Sabina Desani who's also one of our new generation thinkers. So in a way you're the culture bit and the science bit coming into this conversation Sabina. It's a sin has this terrific sequence that I think we could almost go through and add footnotes to. It's a bit where the hero Richie breaks the fourth wall and gives us a kind of lecture on viral epidemiology and all the bad information about it circulating. Now Russell gives this the full treatment. We get a kind of pages from CFAQs thing coming up on the screen. Can we kind of go through the list of these competing etiologies and say something about them like you know an act of God for instance. Absolutely. So the writer Susan Sontag almost at the time that Russell's writing about. So in 89 wrote an essay AIDS and its metaphors and breaks down how society at the time was conceptualising AIDS. And she said that one of the metaphors that was used was this suggestion of judgement or of being complicit in the disease that it was felt to be people's fault or described in a way that it was people's fault. And she linked that with the word plague and that historic notion that you are being judged by your illness. I think that it also intersects with things that were happening politically at the time. So the young men, the boys that you have written about and brought to life in its sin all lived through section 28. And I've got that wonderful scene where there are no books in the library to explain what it is to be growing up gay. And I think that dual sequence of having both the silencing of what it is to be a gay man and then as you're discovering that finding out that falling in love can also be a death sentence. I think that led to a lot of that misinformation that came out. Do you remember how God came into this at the time, Russell? Oh, that was the thing. I mean there was extraordinary problem. It's a judgement. That was everywhere as a thought. It's astonishing how Christian society can be in an emergency. It just reflects backwards onto that. It's nonsense but it's such nonsense, it's hard to find the words to say what nonsense it is. Yeah, but it was a very powerful thing that the people who had misbehaved were getting what they deserved, you know? And that was... Enthusing God as a shorthand for judgement, isn't it? Judgement, exactly. That your mum and dad will judge you for being gay. That's what it's doing. It's stepping in for that. There were other less kind of esoteric explanations that weren't there like the use of poppers, for instance. That's upon the screen there. If you'd been watching the Horizon programme, Killer in the Village in 1983, you would have seen them come up on the screen when you're in the narrator saying the proprietary names out loud like Locker Room and Bolt Hardware. This is Amyl Nitrate in Recreation. Yeah, absolutely. And all sorts of weird, there was all sorts of strange ideas that came out as part of the mystery. I mean, some of it must have been genuinely by doctors and scientists wondering what actually was happening. But then, of course, it became all part of the judgement on the behaviour against it. Yeah, but it's amazing how these theories just gain weight and traction because it's like the very first mention practically of the virus is in 1981 in a New York Times article which more or less works out how it's spread. It says actually transmission is likely to be this and the pattern is likely to be this and then that gets swamped by disinformation for the next seven, eight years. What's your take, Sabina, on the ecology of all that information? In part it was people wanting to other those with a disease. It was saying this doesn't happen to nice people in society. This is about contagions, this is about dirt, intravenous drug users. This happens if you have sex with a prostitute or if you are gay and those three things were presented as wrong lifestyle choices to use the words of the judgmental church at the time. And I think within that climate rumours then spread and Julie write about seeing those first headlines that came from New York about the gay plague and the gay flu and the confusion that there was around. And I think in those climates of secrecy that's when you have rumours. And immediately you say the word plague, you're creating fear anyway because you've got that connotation from history. I notice still that in your book you sometimes name the journalists who wrote those articles. Well I'm not going to be able to remember them right now. Why was it important to put their names in? Well I just felt like if it was out there and they had said it at the time that there was no reason why I shouldn't because they had stood up and said that at the time so I could stand up and say this is what they said. To my knowledge there's never been huge apologies on any of the things they said. So there were some horrific headlines that they allowed. I would shoot my son if he were gay. Quotations they found from people in sections of society that you feel. So I felt quite justified in after all that a journalist that's what they were out there for. So they made a choice at the time. So I felt justified to name them. What about the more outlandish science fictional type explanations that were offered for this Russell? It came from space. This was a theory propounded by Fred Hoyle, the astrophysicist and science fiction writer. And also the biologist Chandra Vikramasinga, who is still head of astrobiology at Buckingham University if you want to ask him about this theory. Shall I read you part of the letter of the Daily Telegraph? We think it most likely in each instance primary entry was secured through infected rainwater entering lesions in feet in the mainly barefoot populations of the third world with subsequent transmissions proceeding through humans. It's quite outlandish. That's unbelievable. Did you say racist borderline kind of? Yes? You cut that bit out and say what you want? But it is though, isn't it? I mean it's so extreme that you can't, that doesn't even feel like it was written at that time. It feels like it was written more hundreds of years ago. And it was written hundreds of years ago. Almost in every pandemic there are metaphors of invasion of aliens taking over. And immunologists run with this and talk about the body mounting a defence back. So it's a sort of extrapolation of the extremes of how we usually explain immunological attack. So we can take that language back to, certainly to 1918 I would have thought. Definitely, take it back to 1918. How does it develop? How does it flower? It flowers through medicine writing back to it and using the analogies of alien takeover. And then writing about using medicines to bolster the body's defences. And I think it's a way of giving form to an illness that we can't see. It's hard not to use that language though, isn't it Jill? Because the language of fight and struggle, I mean that's all there in your memoir, isn't it? It's hard to, it's just the, within using the language of the fight and the struggle. It's just important not to use the language that is creating stigma. Because that's what happens when you're, you know... It's always there, it's always there with illness. It's like having a husband or a cancer. Always a fighter, it's not about that actually. And I think there's a really important distinction Matthew, between patients and partners using the language of war, which I think can be very mobilising when you don't know what to do and you want to rally and give people confidence. But the gripe I have within medicine is that it can de-personalise patients. When the infantry go out to bomb someone or use their weapons, they can't think about collateral damage. It's too dangerous to do that. But when doctors are using targeted treatment, I think they absolutely need to think about the possibilities of adverse effects and the damage that could happen through treatment. And when you stop thinking about that because you're using war language, then real harm can be done and you can stop seeing patients, which I think is an individual level when you're talking about your friends. You can't stop seeing them as people. So that's the reason I feel cautious about it. And also I suppose you could make somebody, they become a hero because they are fighting cancer or something like that, whereas the person who then doesn't survive is perhaps seen not fighting hard enough and of course people fight anyway. There's also this idea of AIDS having been a kind of bio-weapon of some kind, made in a lab. Now, I don't think anybody really knew this at the time, but that had its origins in a Cremlin disinformation campaign called Operation Infection. And it was all, you know, those ideas got into the system because of kind of bad actors putting them out there. And we had those metaphors again during COVID and that language has been made in a lab by the Chinese to infect us all. Do you think that the discourse around AIDS has helped us navigate the COVID pandemic in any way, Jill? Well, that's a good question, hasn't it? You could hear the same thing happening, you could hear the same confusion, but I think because it probably has helped us to navigate a bit, but I think because everything was so open with COVID, it was on the television and there's the internet and there's everything. It's the opposite of that. It was kind of more easy to access information, we couldn't access information. It just didn't come with the shame and the stigma. And it didn't come with the shame and the stigma. The crucial difference. Absolutely the crucial difference. But again, people, I think the COVID epidemic made people think perhaps in a different way about the AIDS epidemic, more so reflecting back on what people had gone through then without any of the help. How so? Just because suddenly all the things were at people's fingertips, you know, the viral loads of people and the testing and all that kind of thing became second nature during COVID and they thought, hang on, people, there was a small group of society, a significant group of society that were dealing with that with no help or no kindness, not no help from the medical profession, but no sort of overall dealing with the fear and the stigma and dealing with all the testing and the results and the viral load testing and all of that sort of thing. And we're all a bit wise, I was still stupid, but now we could all quite freely talk about the immune system. Yes. We didn't back in the 80s. No, we didn't. The immune system, it's that important person here could talk about that now. We knew it exists. So, there was much more, many more barriers to ever come back then. Let's talk about how this disease registered in drama and in depiction and representation. The first AIDS film in Britain is a public information one, isn't it, the don't die of ignorance campaign. Many people may remember it, the voice of John Hurt, cerddol yn cerddol gan Yщеethurnau Cymru nhw wedi'i'r amserion ymhellwyd cerddol, daron 1987, os ymdwynt Daniel Massie yw Clare Bloom. Ies gweld y cyflwynyddur rydyn ni wedi'i ziwethaf nad yw'n ceisio efo'i'r hynny. Pwyddo wedi'u gweld i amser, a chydig ar y ffordd rysg y bydd yw sasrwydd r Oses i Roedd Roedd Rysg Llaengyl, felly rydyn ni'n i gwybod i'r rydyn ni. Yn o ffordd rysg i Roedd yng Ngwyllgor Cymru, mae'r hieb yn ei ddwylo'n ddiolch yn ymhwyllt hwnnw i'r cyfnodd y dyfodol, os yw'r cyfrwyddiadau sy'n ddylch yn gyfnodd sgwyr. Yn y ffynol, y mhwan i ddweud i'r ddiagnosis, mae'n rhan o ddweud o ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r awm, mae'n ddweud i'n ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud. Mae'r language is again all about dirt and contagion. She says, oh, how did you get this? And he says, oh, it was through a dirty tart, and I did something dirty, and it was that dirty girl who's given me this dirty illness. And then they are introduced, or Ruth specifically is introduced, to a gay couple who are on the ward, so she's shown further along the diagnosis, and they're completely silent. Don't think you even see their faces as a long shot down the corridor. And they play this silent bit part to allow Ruth to be the clean one in that drama. And she's invited to speak to them, and she says, no, I've lived a very sheltered life. That's not something I'm comfortable doing. And I felt very sad watching it, as I thought that the gay community who were at the heart of being infected with HIV and AIDS weren't allowed to speak. And the drum was presented that there was this great tragedy, that this good businessman made a bad mistake on holiday, and his wife behaved in the right way by forgiving him and standing by him. But there was also a very interesting contrast. There's a doctor who is the company doctor of the wealthy businessman, and he's got no idea what to do and does some things that are quite unethical, taking blood samples without consent from other people who the businessman works with. And that's such a contrast to the doctor in the teaching hospital who knows all about it, and reminded me in the 90s when I was a medical student myself, seeing the differences between the knowledge that we had in the teaching hospital and the people teaching me had compared to the GPs and other doctors caring for the patients who came to us. And I think that reminded me how rapidly things changed. The textbook I had in 92 was out of date a year later. And because of the way information was disseminated, a lot of rumour affected the medical community too. So this doctor doesn't know how it's transmitted. He thinks it could be in the gym, for example. Either of you two see this because it was like primetime ITV. Do you remember it, Russell? Oh, mop to a flame. I mean my entire life. Any drama. I can't say I've seen everything, but if there's a drama, if there's a subplot, you forget what a game it was in the 90s as well with watching the soap operas, especially on EastEnders. Who's going to have HIV? Colin's feeling ill. There was an EastEnders. The game was equally, we were all equally guilty of playing that game at home. I'm not blaming the program makers. We joined in with that with nasty, vicious smiles on our faces because we enjoyed it. And yet, I do think of course I'm going to forgive the program makers because it's all clumsily lurching towards trying to get something on screen that a lot of people wouldn't want to see on screen. And there's a sort of kind of historical rhyme here, Russell, because intimate contact was directed by Waris Hussain, who was the founding director of Doctor Who. Whilst Waris was directing that program, his own partner was dying of AIDS. Yes, amazing. And every night after filming, he was going to visit him in the real hospital that the set mocked up. That's amazing. So those are good people trying to find a way. The next production learns from that one, the next production learns from that one and fair to us. We should talk about the theory of this. You've mentioned Susan Sontag Sabina. What impact did that essay, that work that she wrote, have? Were people who were trying to depict AIDS on screen and its effects taking the theory and using it? Or did it kind of stand to one side? Is there any sort of cross-fertilisation there, do you think? There was a lot of criticism of her work at a time from the gay community. People felt that it had been written in a very rushed way, that the gay community who were at the heart of writing about AIDS and trying to make different programs, including that the film Philadelphia, that she wasn't working with them and understanding what she was saying. I think one of the things that has happened, and I don't know if it's been a direct response, is that a lot of the drama that came in the years later seemed to work against her metaphors and claim a different language for writing and for doing things for example Tony Kushner's work, Angels in America, where he uses the supernatural and Pryor is a very different sort of hero, Pryor, the protagonist who is infected with AIDS in that drama who doesn't die a heroic death and certainly rails against the judgement from God. He sees visions including angels and has a very passionate relationship with an angel and I think that's a real push back against the... That's a really interesting idea that there could be a kind of developing canon of AIDS dramas written against Sontag. Do you kind of chime with that idea? I think it's broader than that. I think people are busy living lives with these kind of things. I think also it's always also seen as niche and that's hard for... I always hold this up as an example. There's a film called Holding the Man, an Australian film, about the death of a man from AIDS that as a film, a specific fictionist, the finest death scene I've ever seen on screen. It's absolutely magnificent and it should be record-winning, it should be award-winning. It should be the standard by which films are judged if you're going to do a death scene. No, because it's seen as an age drama. It's just seen as an existing in this little niche whereas scholars of cinema should be holding that film up and saying, that's how to do it, but it's not because it's seen as a minority thing. Is there a kind of canon that we could put together? What are the works? What are the dramas or the novels that really captured this properly and say something about that moment of the crisis? The Normal Heart. That was a very powerful piece of drama and it was a very... That's Larry Cramer. I think that that was... I think that at the time, of course, people that were HIV positive and living with it, it was quite important to see anything depicted that had created sympathy or created the truth. So it was a bit of... I know Dursley felt like that. It was a bit of comfort to be recognised. Against that, I'd said, more people will watch one episode of EastEnders than ever went to see The Normal Heart in any of it. Its performance is millions. I do think Mark Fowler's story over 15 years has its faults. Tell us about that for those who don't... Mark Fowler was the son of one of the central family in EastEnders who came back to the show as Todd McCarty played him as HIV positive and we followed his life for a long time. He got married to a woman who was HIV positive. We saw her death. We saw him. We saw prejudice against him. It was a very, very excellent story. It had a downside in that he was straight and I think in some ways that accident... I mean again, people are working for the best attention, the best reasons for making this, but because he stayed there for 15 years, that's a monolith of an image of a man with HIV that I think blocked the gay stories. I think a gay man wasn't diagnosed with HIV in a soap opera until 2016, which was Stee in Hollywood. Oh, as late as that. That's incredibly late. One-off characters would crop up, et cetera, et cetera, but a regular character of Ikea who's in Hollywood is a brilliant actor. He took that on himself as a gay actor to do that. 2016, that's astonishing, isn't it? That's quite astonishing. But I'm not here to blame the Mark Fowler story that was beautifully told, but it's just... When you say there's a canon, there is a canon, but there's no plan. In fact, no one can compare. Everyone's bumping and lumping and shoving and jostling for space, and it's messy. And I wonder if they didn't do that to perhaps make it that anyone can guess. They started at the right reason. They said this affects straight people as well. But then when he's there for 15 years, it's like, how else does it affect? When you've spoken about niche, I was thinking to you how difficult it was to get authentic first-person accounts when we were at medical school and wanting to learn what those experiences were. And so turned again and again to literature. And I was putting a canon together. I'd include Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony, which I'm sure you're both familiar with. It's the last in the trilogy of White's books about growing up between the 1970s and early 1990s in New York, in London, in Paris. And it's named for Haydyn's symphony where in the last movement, the instrumentalists leave one after another. And Haydyn's work too violent is left and in White's work. There's just one central character standing, having buried all his friends and lovers. And a tragedy for me reading that at the time was as I realised that that was Edmund White's own story who has lived and survived into his 80s. But it isn't a book that is well known. It's a book that we read as medical students to understand some of what was happening in the lives of people that we met otherwise on wards or in outpatient clinics. Edmund White is a really important figure, isn't he, in all of this, you know, living with HIV for many years and already a canonical author. The story is also sitting in the shadow of Taylor to the City, of course, which he did his work being popular. It did get into people's hands. One of our first heroes, probably HIV positive hero, was an extraordinary piece of work. And still, there's another book coming up. He's writing another book, which is amazing. How does the figure of the person who cares for the person with HIV or AIDS emerge from this literature, Sabina? You know, the jills, I think we'll probably say. Is this a proper term now? I think a difference between the jills and a lot of the caring figures is that, Jill, you are, in both your book and in It's a Sin, very recognisably human. And I think that that's a departure from a lot of the prevailing literature where nurses are shown as being very angelic. I mean, Kushner's casting notes for angels in America. He says that the nurse and the angel should be played by the same character. I think that makes the role of the nurse very problematic if she has to be this celestial being who can't be flawed. And I think there are people who wanted to see your character in that way, but we see you use humour on the screen. We see you physically struggling with shopping and with balancing your career as an actor with the caring work that you did. And I think that's an important difference, that the trope of the angel and nurse figure being intertwined is something that nurses have also written against. There's a graphic novel by a nurse M.K. Cherwitch who has written a book called Taking Turns, or drawn a book Taking Turns, about her experiences nursing patients with AIDS and shows how she was not an angel, but was someone who became a friend of very many of her patients and went to their funerals in the drama series Pose that was also on during lockdown about New York City's LGBT ballroom culture. There's a nurse Judy played by Sarah Bernard and Sandra Bernard, sorry, and she's also somebody who is not an angel but who is shown as very selfless, who when she's not on nursing shift carries on looking out for her friends. When I saw the character Jill, I know it's not you. I was reminded so much of nurse Judy as well and of the similarities you shared, both becoming activists and really being there 24-7 on call. What do you make of all of that, Jill? And the kind of things that people have said about you, I mean, I've said it already in this conversation about your selflessness. You know, maybe you're really not that selfless, I don't know. It seems to me that it's a representation of everybody, that sort of, I think, because obviously you can't be that sort of, you know, I'm just what I was doing was what a lot of people were doing and I think it all came at once for me. It all came within a very short period of time so it seemed to just fill our lives as I already said but there was even a TV series called Angels which was about this, it was actually called Angels and you used to think, yourself used to think when the doctors and the nurses are angels because they are giving of their time, their knowledge and they're your last hope, they're your only grasp for some sort of treatment so you even think that they're angels so it's all tied in with what everybody was doing. That's what I feel like. It's the only way I can think about it because I can't think it's me because that seems like madness to me. Well anybody, probably all my friends will tell you she's got on their nerves probably telling them what to do fussing around people and all that kind of thing trying to look after people and it comes with its ups and downs obviously it can be very traumatic but without all the whole community it's impossible. I think we were like a family and that's what it felt like at the time. Can we talk about this strange historical coincidence that has occurred with Itza Sin that you should be making this just a moment when another virus should be preoccupying our mind so that much of the imagery of Itza Sin some of those conversations that people are having about masking in Itza Sin were being had out there in the world every day while this show was on. It's how strange, how strange no one could have predicted that or seen that no one wanted it, certainly. It's to protect me, not you, you idiot. Well, that's still said to this day I must have talked to 1,000 gay men about their experiences and every single one of them said they made me wear mask or PPE as I went into the water to visit my friend and I pulled it off and I said I love my friend and give him a kiss and you sit there going it's to protect them, not you that's still told but still get that wrong to this day that actually you're meant to wear that stuff on a water it's very good for everyone but of course then it was part of the whole stigmatisation of the whole thing so yes, how strange sometimes I wonder if anyone would have watched Itza Sin if we hadn't been set that's genuinely interesting to wonder if it hadn't been set during the time of a pandemic whether it would have struck a nerve you just will never know the answer to that one saying about the mask thing to protect the patient that's an obvious thing but with the HIV thing as well people were all masked up as they died and so you're not protecting them any longer because it was obvious where that journey was going to end and so I think that sort of came part of the fear you know even like you do see of course with Covid people were masked up but that's to protect the people not the patient at that point and the constant stupidity of governments is just a really constant line to add the whole thing, their failure to engage with it or to act like adults with it that hasn't changed on spec in fact I think it was worse I think this time to send people into care homes with the disease to let them fester and die and it's more idiotic still that made that scene where there's that wonderful revenge on Mrs Thatcher in that beautiful teapot scene so much more poignant watching that in Covid where a lot of people felt anger with the same type of government that's kind of reactive because Alan Hollinghurst wrote the most beautiful scene in the line of beauty of a young gay man dancing with Margaret Thatcher and a lot of what takes place in this scene is a reaction to other pieces of work when I talk about that great death scene in holding the man that's why you don't see Richie's death at all because I thought I can't top that so actually the only way to top that but the only way to top that is to never see it and play that result and that line of beauty moment was so gorgeous that I thought well I can only make my version of that by making her drink piss really it's nice and nowadays she would end up on I'm a celebrity get married I think that's one of the games one of the rounds isn't it this work is also about I think dealing with the past more generally and I wonder what it was like to work on it and acknowledge that your own experiences now are part of something that we have to call period drama that's odd because you get a different budget for period drama period really really and everything you couldn't have a single a limited in a way actually I wish I'd very very proud of what we made I kind of longed for the big expensive Netflix version where they could have stood in Piccadilly Circus and with period cars driving around them and you know just had to have the budget that other shows have there's still a niche to it we're very lucky that it worked and it found an audience but it's budget is still a very very small niche budget I can't complain it worked but yeah, how strange and there was a lot of nostalgia of people like seeing the posters on the walls the books loads of things and then you realise as you say about your life becoming a period drama and I've heard something quite recently which people now have people have pink palace parties and they dress up and they go oh we dress up in all this retro gear and we go like trying to look like we're from the 80s and they're all very young and you think oh my god now I'm a cost you know retro it's a retro life now so it's quite funny when you start mining into it that I've ever seen where they turn from the John Hurt AIDS advert over to Michael Barrymore on IT I love that complex television was of closeted out and not closeted oh the tension of the whole thing I loved all that, I loved exploring that one of the things you said earlier Russell was about when to know that it was the right time to deal with this story and the idea of treating death as a subject as well I mean as you've mentioned yourself already you lost your husband Andrew Smith in 2018 after a long illness through which you cared for him how is that experience documented in It's a Sin? Yes that's absolutely his death was very much like Collins actually that was a kind of almost transcribed where his eyes were open in his last few days but he just couldn't see his eye just swept from side to side like some strange lighthouse and who knows what he was thinking he was beyond speech at that point so I don't plan to put things like that on the page but when I'm writing then it's all I've got it's my paint I have to do it and I think it's some way I'm kind of memorialising that at the same time but also there's a horrible part of me that finds it fascinating that cruel and cold part of a writer that says that's good material I'll put that in, it's undoubtedly there as well but also it's a way of remembering him strangely there's many other ways of remembering my husband so I think his death undoubtedly was the thing and being a carer for him as well was undoubtedly the final thing that swung me around so you know what the drama of the death bed is like as well as the feeling of it and the oddness of it we've all seen a hundred bad death bed scenes and just the plainness of it the chat that goes around the bedside the ordinariness of it and when you're writing as well when you're writing something that's so personal to you then you know it's the truth you know it's exactly what happens you can feel like that is an absolute need it's always just a bit more stranger but my husband died in the middle of an episode of Killing Eve I always find that funny in a strange way that everyone's a critic obviously I like to show myself life is odd, life is never holding the hand and the final breath and slipping away well rarely sometimes and also it is just you can't really explain it until I'm sure many people have had that experience but just how the life is going on around you like you go and get some sandwiches or you know and you think you'd better hurry and get the sandwiches and hope they're still there when you get back because you know that thing they always say that you know when someone's dying you can it's a very oft repeated story that you can whisper in their ear now it's okay you can go now I'm saying that a hundred times it's okay you can go now it's okay you can go now and then they'll go when you leave the room how many times can you say it hearing you two talk about this this is the kind of conversation that everybody who's who's survived this disease will have stories like that and those kind of jokes and those kind of reflections is that what people have been coming to you and sharing after that's part of the whole nature of it the survival I'm making my god you have a laugh at a funeral don't you quietly secretly someone says something when my mother walked into a funeral someone turned to her and said oh I thought I'd been to yours Barb and then we all stood in the night laughing like that I was quite young when I saw that and that's lodged in my head and I was like that's what it's like, that's a survival mechanism we just do it I was thinking as you were saying that and making us all laugh that the importance of your work and of Jill's book was that these very private moments and the deathbed scenes that usually people don't see we were all invited into and that you took such singular experiences and gave them to everybody that everyone who was at home during Covid was a participant in the morning and the joy and the raucous laughter and I had the same experiences with the great pleasure of reading your book Chris and Jill and that you managed to bring something so private and hilarious and tragic into people's lives at a time where we were all in our own Covid bubbles Well there was one moment when Dursley we thought Dursley was going to pass and we called as many people as we could get hold of to come to the hospital immediately and everybody gathered around the beds and everyone was sort of there was tears and there was all sorts happening and then suddenly he opened his eyes and he said I'd really fancy some chicken fajitas I was like run run run oh yes of course as if nothing had happened you know it was absolutely true we thought it's the weirdest thing that happened and it's funny it's like there was a kind of generation coming into coming of age that's starting to tell these stories more and more and for example in the audience we've got Paul Burstin who's got a memoir coming out we can be heroes and Paul is a massive activist Paul was literally the person lying on Westminster Bridge and fighting with policemen and it's an amazing book that tells all in every there's a million different versions of the story and it's different to your book it's his own experience and there's great stories to be told I think we should get the microphones out into the audience and if Paul Burstin wants to ask a question or make a comment he will be very welcome to do so his hand has gone up so perhaps the microphone could come up ok here's our first one let's set up the next one here put your hand up and the mic will come to you ok so we oh sorry I thought that was a person about to be asked a question rather than one of the put your hand up and there it is the panel talked about fighting talk and about the fight I was involved in Act Up and our slogan was Act Up Fight Back Fight AIDS and of course the reality is we couldn't fight AIDS because no one knew how to fight it what we were fighting was misinformation prejudice, stigma and I think one of the really powerful things that it's a sin achieves and Jillsburg also achieves is it tells the narrative as it actually was for us at the time and that is a really empowering thing to live through that because one of the hardest things was feeling that we weren't being seen or that we were being misrepresented all the time and the absence of imagery of the absence of positive stories about people with HIV and how they lived and how they died was part of the pain of it all people around even my own family not understanding what I was going through I was 23 years of age and my own parents didn't understand what I was going through I mean it's insane when you think about it so when I watched Russell Ray kindly sent me a link to watch it and I watched the whole season in one evening and I cried for everybody I hadn't cried for for years and that's part of the healing process so I want to thank him for that A lot of it's a sin is taking some conversations I've had with Paul, Paul told me about that family that burns their son's possessions at the end of episode 2 that's one of your shocking tales and I'm so grateful to you for telling me that but what do you see of those experiences on screen then? What do I see of them? Russell has just said that he owes a debt to you do you read that debt in the series? I recognise some scenes I mean the bonfire scene in particular because that was horrific at the time and we talked about it of a brunch in Balans I think it was wasn't it? Yeah so I recognise that and also the activism you get towards the end when they came out of the police van I think Act of New York which was founded by Larry Cramer who was mentioned earlier who wrote The Normal Heart was a very very theatrical type of demonstration they used to stage rather lavish things we mainly lay down in the road and blocked traffic we were quite scrappy and kind of you know we were that ambitious so I recognise that as well we don't bother the vans and they block the traffic and they get dragged away by the police our slogan was Act of London Lie Down See it was Paul doing that and I'm always telling people I wasn't me, I wasn't carried to the police van and being over the head, I wasn't that brave so that's the truth Andy Beallus, do you stick your hand up you don't have to have been one of Russell's contributors to this conversation Hi and this is by Lea Segway actually my favourite scene was when they're lying on the ground and he just says can I have my job back and eventually it was a terrific scene I wanted to ask kind of the opposite of nostalgia or retro I moved to London by way of San Francisco and New York and what's astonishing to me and maybe my generation is how many people are living with HIV now and they're undetectable and people are on prep and so forth can you direct us to a character or a story where the person has HIV and it's not a plot point where this is just part of their life and they're not under threat and they're not dying can you tell us about those works or write one and they do exist in the soap opera again that's Steve Ciaran Richards who plays Steve in Hollywood that was 2016 he's still there hardly ever mentioned these days it's just part of his natural life he's a cleaner at the moment he's a cleaner with his friend and they clean places in a funny way so again I'm sorry to keep referring back to soap operas but I do think they're a great bedrock of story that while other things flare up and come and go they are the constant storytellers of our age so there's that yes I think we worried a lot in making it's a sin that the present story of HIV wouldn't be told there was originally meant to be a final episode in the present day with modern day Jill discovering what happened to everyone and what the state of things are now they just wasn't the money to make it at the end of secret army exactly, yes or Tenco reunited that one but none so we worried about that a great deal but what we hadn't reckoned with was that everyone watches television with their phones in their hands now so the searches that went on, the figures for testing went up so the social media played its part hugely there and that's how people watch television now you don't watch it in isolation you have a conversation going on at the same time which I was delighted by as a program maker I think I was supposed to complain about that saying hush listen to my dialogue, it's so beautifully crafted but actually if they are now texting each other going what's going on, what's going on looking at you equals you now but those stories are there still waiting to be told absolutely just sticky hand up, how much time we got are we alright oh he sounds very relaxed let us have all night on ridder three we've got a question down here can we get the microphone down here to the put your hand up and it'll come oh you've got, sorry Edd, it's yes, go on one of the things that really blew my mind was I was born in the middle of the AIDS crisis so it's always been retrospective to me and it was the idea that oh God, people didn't know what it was people really did think oh God this could have been something that was sent from God so I just wondered if at the time there was any rationale when people didn't know what it was that was causing it if there was any rationale and if there was any even if it was a small part of you you thought this is so odd is this some sort of retribution for something is this some sort of curse on my people our people yes you're right in the word odd the sheer oddness of it I could never understand and still seem so especially cruel to this day when you know the physical truth of it which is that I could never get, and I tried to capture that in it's a sin in those early years of the sheer oddness of people saying in effect gay people we know how complicated that is now and yet in some physical senses it is more likely to effect gay people and so that just seemed so impossible and that impossible I mean these days we have genuine disinformation and that's a whole industry and it's weaponized and it's pulling society apart back then you created the disinformation in your head because it was so unbelievable it seemed so impossible a cold can kill you that's what everyone used to say people did use to say that and of course that is nothing I forgot to do that in I remember people actually saying that because they heard about that you'd have no immune system therefore anything can kill you instead of realizing the actual biology of it nobody had a clue I never thought that was true but you absolutely massively felt oh my god this is feeding into people who do believe that kind of stuff but that was the shock of it that was the mountain to face was there anyone who thinks we are wrong and shameful and should be killed had this virus on their side it seemed that was so amazing look I'm still wrestling with the hugeness of that right now as I'm saying it it's so insane the way those things fitted together so perfectly to be bad for our community is amazing I think that partial information was also something that the medical community was struggling with at the time not knowing how to explain information disseminate it because there weren't all the things you have now you've talked about social media and Jill has that lovely page in your book or paragraph where you talk about keeping the cat away from your friend because of wanting to protect him from toxoplasmosis and knowing that it was transmitted by cats but not how and I think the but not how is a bit that often clouded the information it was such a strange day such a strange day a mind of disinformation for everybody so even if you were trying to do your best you were wrestling with your own misinformation like horror cat coming towards us so we had a question there didn't we oh you've got the mic go ahead so firstly I guess when I was watching it's a sin I didn't cry until right at the end where I just so I'm living with HIV currently and that moment absolutely broke me into tears when she used the word like shame being the thing that drives a lot of people's issues that come from this so well done for making me cry but the thing I wanted to touch on was that I'm a sexual health doctor here in London and you talked about potentially in terms of current stories and one of the current stories that I see coming through now is something from well we should call it Mpox now and how the community has kind of come together regarding it I just want to know your thoughts about how the community has because I mean from my personal experience it's been absolutely wonderful to see kind of how a viral illness should be dealt with exactly the same old story of the community rallying and forming and not just, it doesn't just mean the queer community either it's like one of the things I wanted to write Jill's story was actually to pay respect to the way the West End community became a really massive early force in what do you think the whole trillion about kicking their necks were the first people doing bed pushes and charities and concerts and stuff so it seems to be every time that community leads the way and we've seen it now with Mpox but also to see that on social media to be scrolling through Instagram to see if people are talking about it the genies are out of the bottle in a way there's no secrecy anymore it's out there and people are fighting and talking about it and I love that, of course the disinformation is there as well but not so much with Mpox I'm sure my social media is an echo chamber but you're right, you see very good stuff about it very learned stuff, educational stuff Could you elaborate and answer your own question just in terms of I guess what was also interesting is seeing the hysteria that was also being driven around by media, not necessarily by social media actually in fact I found social media we were asking where to get the vaccine if anything and that was via social media and that was information that was being accessible and I'm wondering if you also experienced that during the AIDS crisis whether that was how information was being passed around because Well, information was much more word of mouth until you could actually get into one of the centres when the hospitals became HIV clinics and then you could get proper information but initially you were relying on the Terence Higgins Trust who put leaflets in bars and clubs and things like that but it was much more like with much more sketchy much more much harder to get hold I asked about information actually in a my ordinary going to a GP appointment and I could really get nothing other than this work you don't need to worry about it it's not something you need to worry about most of that I had I was worried about my friends not myself at that point so it was much harder to get information It's hard to look back how we ever communicated How did we all arrange to meet in the pub at 7.30 in those days How did you do it? You actually turned up You actually made the time and kept the time and said I'm 20 minutes late and I'm just getting on the bus or whatever We've got one there and one there and one in here first and perhaps we could pass this to the other one down to the front row I'm not seeing people over here Sorry, go ahead Russell, you mentioned that the start of the conversation about burying your gaze I've just written a Doctor Who story where the Doctor has a trans character who dies at the end and you're responsible for some of the most shocking deaths on television including Lance in Cucumber and also Russell Tovey in years and years which I will never forgive you for When you start writing do you select a character where you think this is going to be the shocking death this is going to be the moment that people think you devil Russell to you Why did you do that? I don't select a character to die but I create them knowing that they'll die so that was always their story and I'm completely unafraid there's a trope that says you must about writing the burial gaze trope which is about killing off the minority characters but I'm completely unafraid and bored of that trope because they're not minority characters to me they're the leading straight characters they've always had great deaths they've had great deaths for thousands of years unless we need to catch up with that so I very happily do it Russell Tovey himself didn't die that would be a cause for national morning frankly he's immortal I'm not going to ask about poppers don't worry it's about touch actually because when I watched It's a Sin something about that really affected me watching that was how people touched each other or didn't touch each other and you all talked about masks and distance and I remember at the time in the 80s being introduced to people who then wouldn't shake hands with me when it was very quickly established that I was gay and I was also told not to go to people's houses that I'd been to for years and of course we had the and I can't remember if it's in the series the Princess Diana moment when she touched when she touched somebody with HIV and of course the only kind of touch that many gay men had experienced was a homophobic violent form of touch so I've tried to sort of pretend this is a question so if you could sort of comment perhaps on how on touch and it's made me think I maybe want to write something about touch and if you know what I'm driving at yes that was always there in my thinking again talking about the cannon one of the earliest pieces is a piece called an early frost which is a very great film written by the people who did the American Queers Ron Cowan and Dan Lippman and that's got a very brilliant scene where the lead character who was HIV positive I think he's actually in full-blown aid his sister's very kind, very compassionate runs across the room from Uncle and she snatches the child out of his heart because she's so afraid of her brother touching her child and actually that's a very great moment that sums it up beautifully it's why I had Omari's Roscoe's sister come round with a baby and happily a lot of this a lot of the stuff I wrote is reacting to these pieces of work so I had someone very happily holding a baby in a gay drama about 8 in the 1980s just to show that not everyone felt like that and that's a scene that's just a bit of chit chat it wouldn't have looked like an AIDS scene but to me it was it was saying that some people were fine so yes it is there it's absolutely there and I think the Keely Hall's Blessers at a tough time being put into a train such a tough hard and damaged mother in that but even she has a scene but she does hug Richie on his hospital bed that's when she really never comes to terms with it but that's when a barrier breaks for her is she kisses his face when he's crying she kisses his fluids and does that very deliberately and I think you can have problems with that character but I love her for doing that in that moment I think that's absolutely wonderful of her so yeah it's constant I know there's a friend down here who was the partner of one of my very good friends that passed away and he we experienced that with a friend who just was too frightened to allow her children to be anywhere near him she just panicked and and it was never ever going to spread to the children or anything and she sort of knew it but she just couldn't take the risk she was too frightened for her children and that feels horrible you know and another friend of ours who was diagnosed is still with us another was that his friend would not allow her to be with the children and so it goes runs very deep that just to say I'm wondering if we're all at the gay community LGBT community we're sort of scarred by that you know we carry that even into the there's a psychiatrist here I mean the unconscious you know the net every generation so the way we're all talked about historically and the othering so we have to kind of reclaim touch if that doesn't sound ridiculous that sounds beautiful that's wonderful thing to say absolutely I want to end things with something that you normally do a bit near to the top of a programme of reading or I should say really a performance at the end of Love from the Pink Palace there is a sort of well there's a kind of little play that Jill has written it has parts that's part for Jill in it I'm handing out here as a part for Russell too so I'll read the stage directions and you play yourselves we really need a sound effect for this maybe we could just add one okay Jill answers her phone in a separate spotlight stage left Russell T. Davis is revealed okay I really do this when my phone says Jill oh I've phoned her okay and I love you so people ask me how how I've lived till now I tell them I don't know I don't know he doesn't have the octave you've been singing that to me every time we speak since 1982 and it still makes me laugh yeah I won't keep you where are you I'm just heading up the harbour in Marseille of course you are darling I've got something exciting for you I'm going to offer you a part in boys that's the work entitled anyway it's some really nice scenes you want to play Jill's mother well that is your own mother she has a lovely mum where she hugs Jill hello can you hear me oh my god yes yes I can hear you yes I would love to oh my god I can't believe it when's it filming hello this is incredible it's absolutely right that you should be in it I'm stunned hello I'll call you as soon as I get to the next port bye I love you bye thank you that really did happen that really did happen and then I had to go back into the office and they said what did she say I said she was on a cruise ship in a storm off Marseille that just sums her up and that is the end of the show my thanks to the producer, Torchel McLeod and the Royal Society of Literature and the British Library for being our hosts and to our guests Sabina Dassani Russell T. Davis but most of all to Jill Nulder author of Love from the Pink Palace and clearly somebody we'd all be glad to have as a friend absolutely