This was a super hard series to watch but also so important.

It’s A Sin follows a group of friends who live in a flat in London during the 80s and most of them are gay or bisexual.

AIDs is just becoming a thing in America that people know about and slowly it’s making its way towards England. While this group of friends is quite promiscuous and enjoying their 20s there’s always a thought in the back of your mind watching, what if one of them gets this disease?

We slowly see this group change from people unfortunately dying from the disease to relationships falling apart because of it and a character named Jill who is just trying to do all she can for her friends.

Looking at the character Jill, she is truly an angel. She was inspired by a real woman called Jill who played the character’s mum in the series and she was there for her friends and for anyone who needed some comfort and some companionship during this horrific time. She was really that last bit of light these people would’ve seen in their lives, especially at this time being gay and having this disease was seen as such a stigmatised thing, that family members would literally burn peoples’ memories and belongings just to get rid of them.

You never realise how poignant Princess Diana shaking the HIV positive person’s hand was until you watch this. I was born in the 90s and so know little of this time and to see how these people were treated when no one knew how it was really passed on and watching them basically waiting to to die was horrible.

It’s horrific seeing the stigma around AIDs being so intimately shown to you, these men were in their final moments, they knew that they had a death sentence at this time in the world and there was nothing they could do about it. All their enjoyment of living their lives freely was gone because now they couldn’t do anything, they couldn’t have sex with whoever they wanted, they couldn’t see people they would normally, they had to be confined to a room where people wouldn’t even touch them with fear they might get the disease too.

I think we often take for granted that we live in a world now where we have medicines and we have ways of being able to combat these horrible diseases. We are able to live semi-normal lives with ailments that 10/20 years ago would’ve killed us. I know with my arthritis, before it was diagnosed there were days where I couldn’t even walk down the stairs because it was too painful, and now I can live a normal life like everyone else because of the medicine I am on. We are so lucky to have what we have today and it’s such a wonderful thing to think it will just keep getting better in the future.

We need to learn from the past and look at who these people were and remember them because so many peoples’ lives, young peoples’ lives, were lost just because of a disease that we did not understand yet and most of these people died alone or scared because they were seen as dirty or animalistic.

I highly recommend you watch the show. It’s complex in the way you see the highs of these peoples lives, you see how much enjoyment they got through living their 20s and making the most of being in London during that time, but at the same time there’s always that haunting fear of who will get it next and what will happen to them.

What do you think of It’s A Sin?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding