It's a Sin: Part 5

 "I haven't handled this well. I realise this now."

RTD, you magnificent bastard. You have this grown man still teary an hour after seeing the episode, damn you. You get us to like these very human characters, and then you do horrible things to them.

This is an incredible conclusion to a sublime television drama that will be remembered through the ages. Keeley Hawes shows us exactly why she's there in what had previously seemed like a suspiciously small role as Valerie realises what's happening with her dying son ("I've got AIDS. I'm gay" all at once) and reacts with a heartbreakingly realistic sense of denial and a very specific type of bigotry, the bigotry of Middle England and the Daily Mail: the bigotry that sees itself as "common sense". RTD absolutely nails this attitude as Richie's parents whisk him off to the Isle of Wight and keep him away from the people he loves- and Ash, his boyfrend, is stuck in London.

It's not all about Richie's death: Roscoe starts to reconcile with his contrite father, shocked at the treatment of AIDS patients in Nigeria. Valerie says some interesting things about Jil having no life of her own, and we see at the end how Jill, a familiar face to the hospital staff, holds the hands of men dying from AIDS, whether she knows them or not. She's lovely.

The dialogue, the characterisation, the structure, all of them are perfect. The fact that we end not with Richie's death but, like a wake, a flashback to a moment that makes us smile. The lttle things about Valerie's reaction- and how Richie's dad, previously so firm abot Richie's career choices, just collapses emotionally. The skeweing of a sort of stiff-upper-lip English type of family emotion. And, of course, the cruel revelation of Richie having dies alone, kept away from his real family. Jill's parting words to Valerie are powerful and, I think, authorial voice: the real tragedy of AIDS is that so many men died in shame, shame of what they were, shame that is drip, drip, dripped on them by a culture that erases and centures any thing that does not conform to traditional family values. The curse of Middle England, that evil place.