How Britain Is Reacting to âItâs a Sinâ
The show, which aired last month in the U.K., has broken a viewing record and revived conversations about how the country handled the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
From left, Omari Douglas, Lydia West, David Carlyle, Calum Scott Howells and Nathaniel Curtis in âItâs a Sin.âCredit. Ben Blackall/HBO Max
By Scott Bryan
Feb. 22, 2021
LONDON â In what may be a perfect formula for helping a well-made TV show go viral, all five episodes of âItâs a Sinâ arrived on a British streaming service in late January, on the Friday before a snowy weekend, during a national lockdown.
Analysis
Darren McGarvey interviews a number of guests in his new four-part series including Hugo Rifkind, the son of a Tory grandee CLASS is one of the defining concepts of life, Scotland and capitalism – but barely receives much informed analysis on our TV screens. Instead, we are offered unstated but loaded assumptions in news, TV documentaries and countless other programmes, with a distinct bias on how success, aspiration and failure are seen and judged. In today’s environment Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars – a new four-part series on BBC Scotland – is a breath of fresh air, the first two of which have been aired. This is in the context of today’s media a watershed series, something which breaks through the barriers and unstated assumptions which shape TV broadcasting and commissioning. This is serious TV with complexity, intelligence, heart and explicit politics.
‘ALL my life, people have been insisting that social class is no longer relevant” Darren McGarvey says in the opening of Class Wars, a new documentary series whose first episode aired on BBC Scotland this week. Darren’s mission? To “prove to you just how entrenched social class is in Scotland”. The hook for episode one is a personal sense of crisis. With the success of his book Poverty Safari, he now finds he has “been afforded the very lifestyle I spent much of my life slagging off”. So what now? I was once one of those people who would have strongly resisted this kind of class analysis. Until I was in my mid-20s, I saw it as an inherently reactionary way of looking at the world. Just as there could be no intellectually respectable version of racism, I once believed that obsessing over class simply got in the way of treating other people as individuals, entrenching divisions and encouraging people to focus on their differences and alienations from one another,
STV/STV Player OF all the reasons for taking a long hard look at yourself, being attacked by Piers Morgan ought to be at the bottom of a very long list. The Good Morning Britain presenter operates at the pig’s bladder on a stick level of journalism, there for amusement – if that’s your kind of whoopee cushion thing – rather than edification. Yet as we saw in Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars, the first of a four-part series, it was Morgan calling him a “raging lunatic” that led to a bout of soul-searching for the eponymous author and rapper.