Russell T Davies has a new show on Channel 4 called It's a Sin. It could be viewed, he told Seán Rocks on Arena, as part of a loose trilogy of dramas about gay men – or even the same gay man – alongside Queer as Folk and Cucumber. It's just that viewed like that, they're in the wrong order. But, given that Davies is the man who successfully revived the BBC's favourite Time Lord, maybe we shouldn't expect too strict a chronology. It's a Sin is a very personal show to Davies. It's set mainly in the 1980s – when he was a teenager – and tells the story of five friends in London in the shadow of the emerging AIDS epidemic. But how many of the friends, Seán wanted to know, are Russell? 

"One of them's Welsh, which is very much me. One of them is kind of bright, which frankly was me, a long time ago in 1981. Yeah, there's actually bits of me and there's bits of almost everyone I've known in just about every line of dialogue in the entire thing. You could be a forensic scientist, you could do CSI on this and put every line under a microscope, or a spectrometer and trace it back to something someone once told me somewhere." 

Davies's breakout drama Queer as Folk deliberately avoided much mention of AIDS, as he wanted it to focus on the characters and their lives, rather than be about gay men getting a virus. 

"I'm not sure how aware I was at the time, but then – bear in mind I wrote that in 1998 and at the time, we'd had two decades of HIV and every single character in fiction, every gay character on screen was a HIV story." 

It's a Sin is full of HIV stories and, even though it was written and filmed before the current pandemic, a drama about a new virus sweeping through a community and all the unknowns that it brings with it, hits home harder than Davies could have expected. But while it's a drama about a particularly traumatic time for gay men in London, Russell told Seán that it's not necessarily a tough watch: 

"It's a much better watch than simply watching something about illness because I'm celebrating the lives of these people. It's full of life, it's full of joy, it's full of comedy, actually." 

You can hear the full conversation between Seán and Russell T Davies, by going here. 

It's a Sin is currently showing Friday nights on Channel 4 and all five episodes are available on All4. 

Niall Ó Sioradáin