Russell T Davies’s five-part drama about a flat of young gay men in eighties London is the warmest and, for three episodes, the most controlled writing he has done. The last two reach for speeches the story had already made; the cast carry them anyway.
It’s a Sin covers ten years in five episodes: a flat in London, five friends, and an illness that begins as a rumour at the edge of the frame and walks to the middle of it. Russell T Davies wrote all five hours and Peter Hoar directed all five, and the plan is plain enough. Make the first hour such fun that we cannot bear what follows. It works.
Our verdict is that the first three episodes are as good as any British television drama we have seen in years, and the last two are louder and less sure of themselves. That is a caveat, not a warning. We would still put this in front of almost anyone who can sit through a 15 certificate, and we think it is the best thing Davies has written.
Olly Alexander plays Ritchie as a boy who has decided to be delightful and mostly manages it; the vanity is written in and Alexander does not hide it. Omari Douglas gets the funniest lines as Roscoe and delivers every one as a defence. Lydia West’s Jill is the one who reads the leaflets and rings the clinics, and West plays her worry as something she has to do quietly so the boys will not notice. The surprise is Callum Scott Howells. Colin barely speaks in the first episode. He watches the others, and by the third hour his watching has become the centre of the thing.
David Katznelson shoots the Pink Palace and the clubs in oranges and pinks, with light that seems to come from lamps somebody has thrown a scarf over, and he shoots the hospital wards in a flat green with no source you can find. Luana Hanson fills the flat with so much clutter that we notice every object that later goes missing. Ian Fulcher’s costumes move the decade along faster than the year cards do: Ritchie’s jackets get bigger, Roscoe’s get sharper, Colin’s stay the same. Murray Gold writes less music than he might have and lets the period records do the work, which is the right decision. Sarah Brewerton cuts the years as a run of nights, bodies, doors and songs, so the good times go past quickly, and that speed is the point.
The flat has a greeting, a shouted “La”, and the first few times it comes round it is a joke about how young they are. By the fourth episode it is not a joke any more, and that is when the series got us. Andria Doherty, as Colin’s mother Eileen, did the rest: a Welsh woman on a ward being told the rules by nurses in masks, who never once raises her voice. We cried, and we were not expecting to, because nothing on screen was asking us to.
The faults are Davies’s usual ones. He cannot resist a speech, and in the final episode characters start explaining to each other what the previous four hours have already shown. One late confrontation is written as an essay with a woman standing in front of it. Nathaniel Curtis’s Ash is the fifth friend and is treated like it; Roscoe’s sister Solly (Shaniqua Okwok) opens a strand about his family that the series picks up and drops. Neil Patrick Harris is good, but a face that famous in a Savile Row fitting room pulls the eye out of 1981 for a minute each time. None of this sinks it. It just means the ending is asking for more than it needs to.
Against Davies’s own work, the comparison is with Queer as Folk from 1999, which was the party without the bill. This is the bill, and he has written it with more patience and less showing off than anything since. The reviews so far sit close to where we do, and we see no reason to quarrel with them.
Five episodes at 48 minutes is four hours, and we would not watch them in one sitting; the cutting needs a night between episodes to land. Watch it with someone. The 15 certificate is for the sex, which is frank and cheerful, and for the language, and for a fourth episode you will want company for.
