You’ll wish you were gay: Channel 4’s It’s a Sin reviewed

To promote his new drama series about Aids in the early 1980s, Russell T. Davies insisted in an interview that gay characters should be played only by actors who are actually gay.

This was maddening for a number of reasons, starting with blatant hypocrisy. One of the things that made Davies’s Queer As Folk so watchable was Aidan Gillen’s mesmerising performance as the smirking, predatory, cocksure queen of the Mancunian gay scene Stuart Alan Jones. It was the making of Gillen, who went on to star as Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish in Game of Thrones. But Gillen, who has a girlfriend and two children, almost certainly fails Davies’s gay authenticity test.

Nor is it healthy for the thespian trade in general. In ancient Greek drama, actors were known as ‘hypokrites’, since when it has been accepted by everyone, apart from a minority of demented social justice activists, that the job of acting involves pretending to be something you are not. ‘You wouldn’t cast someone able-bodied and put them in a wheelchair,’ says Davies, warming to his idiot theme. Maybe, in honour of this fatuous dictum, we should retrospectively cancel the Oscar that Daniel Day-Lewis won for My Left Foot.

Thirdly, it detracts from the actual drama Davies’s mischievous, fogey-goading remarks were trying to promote, It’s a Sin. Not only will it have put off lots of people who might otherwise have watched the series and enjoyed it. But it also breaks the fourth wall by tacitly encouraging the viewer to conflate the cast with the characters they’re playing. It’s reminiscent of the Harry and Paul sketch where two old buffers sit in their gentleman’s club deciding which public figures are and aren’t ‘queah’. Knowing in this case that all the actors are ‘queah’ distractingly draws attention to something that should, properly, be irrelevant.