07/03/2022
On Friday night, the Drama Channel gave an airing to a very early episode of hit mystery drama series Silent Witness. Originally transmitted in March of 1997, the episode called Cease upon the Midnight was focussed in the gay community of Brighton and the lives of men using an AIDS hospice during the final years of the pandemic before anti-retroviral drugs became widely available. Indeed, to some degree the programme was anarchronistic on its first transmission on BBC-1, because AIDS had already ceased to be such a killer the previous year, when combination therapies radically began to alter the outlook of HIV positive people in the Western World. For its time, the programme dealt sensitively with gay and HIV issues, although some would argue that it was clumsy in places. An interesting piece of television drama and of gay representation.
