What a month January was, eh? We had a lockdown, a failed coup, an inauguration, a little bit of screwing over the rich, and two concurrent transatlantic series of Drag Race. It somehow felt like three months and two weeks all at once.
So here’s an antidote to the mad dash of last month; Good Screen’s Three Things. This is, as the title would suggest, three things — not necessarily new or zeitgeist-y — that I liked from the month in Content™, and that I recommend you check out.
I’m hoping this becomes a regular thing, but I live for feedback; reply to this email or leave a comment if you think it works or you’d like to see something else.
It’s a Sin
TV • Channel 4 (UK); HBO Max (US, from Feb 18); Stan (AUS)
Where a lot of queer 80s drama tends to focus on activists fighting for rights or for solidarity, Russell T Davies’ newest drama is smaller in scope; based on his own experiences, it’s about the “boys in the bedsits” of the early AIDS crisis.
We’re given a bird’s-eye view of five young friends who converge on London as AIDS is making its way across the Atlantic, and all the emotions that come together as an epidemic wraps its tentacles around an entire community.
We see solidarity as friends and chosen families work to support each other through terrible times, but we also see denial, conspiracy, and stigma — much like we’ve done during our current pandemic.
What’s perhaps most telling, however, is that we also see a story that’s been left mostly untold to a new generation of LGBT people — not just of the burden that thousands of victims faced, or the trauma faced by those who survived them, but of the shame and prejudice that cost lives too.
(A quick sidenote: it’s National HIV Testing Week in the UK this week. When detected and treated early, in conjunction with things like PreP, people with HIV can be undetectable, so they can’t pass the virus on. If you’re in an at-risk group, or you’ve never been tested before, grab a self-test kit here.)
Hugh’s Joy of Food
Podcast • Spotify; Buzzsprout
Restaurant PR guru Hugh Smithson-Wright — who, full disclosure, has been a Twitter mutual of mine for close to a decade — has maybe delivered one of my all-time favourite podcasts this month, and he’s only just started.
Joy of Food is really short, simple in structure, and makes me feel smarter — all fantastic box-tickers for a recovering uni radio producer like myself. Perhaps the best part of it, though, is that it’s full of passion.
Hugh comes across as podcasting’s Nigella — so keen to talk about how fantastic food can be, revelling in the joy it can bring, and with that same sumptuous, intimate conversation. I’m looking forward to much, much more of this.
Summer Paws
Game • PC (via Steam)
Summer Paws is a pretty basic game when you get down to it; it’s a hidden object game where your goal is to find and wake up all the sleeping cats on a series of summer holiday-themed islands.
I won’t lie, my original plan was to talk about Ori and the Blind Forest in this bit; it was one of two other games I’ve played this month that I really enjoyed. Summer Paws won out, though, because in all the clicking around for sleepy low-poly cats I found something January was otherwise stubborn to give: a little bit of calm. It’s £4, and no more than an hour long in practice; if you just need to take a bit of cognitive load off, I can’t recommend it enough.