BBC newsreader Jane Hill has described her excitement about the hit TV show ‘It’s A Sin’ appearing on our screens and how hard it is for LGBTQ+ people to come out to their parents.
The 52-year-old, who regularly presents the BBC News at One, said she was thrilled that Russell T Davies had written Channel 4’s ‘It’s A Sin’.
The newsreader, who is herself openly gay, also compared it to the craze of Line of Duty because she thought everyone would be watching it and talking about it.
Hill said: “There is no way I could not watch something that has so profoundly affected our community.
“There so little still on TV, I think, that reflects gay life, and we have to soak up every single thing we get because there’s still not much of it and there’s particularly not much of it for gay women.
“We are so poorly represented on TV, even today, that I think anything that has a gay or bi element to it I will soak it up and most gay women I know would say the same thing because we don’t have much that’s tailored to us so we have to seek it out wherever we can find it.
“I’m trying to think about whether I had a single friend who didn’t watch ‘It’s A Sin’, actually.
“I also loved it because it made me quite wistful. I struggled so much to deal with my sexuality, although this was more about men not women, I watched it not for the first time thinking oh Jane this is how you should have been living your life in your 20s!
“I thought the drama was good at showing the fear/hysteria at the time.”
She recalled a conversation with a younger friend who told her she didn’t realise the misconceptions which featured in the program about people thinking that you could catch the HIV virus through touching which was later found to be untrue.
We discussed the moment when in the drama Ritchie’s mum meets his best friend Jill – who tells him that he has died despite both theirs and his wishes to see him before he died.
Part of the reason for this was because she could not accept the identity of her son.
Hill said: “It was a real heart in the mouth moment.
“I thought that was the ultimate cruelty.
“There are still thousands of young gay men and women who are ostracised by their families today. Coming out today is not necessarily easy just because it is 2021.
“It’s still not always fine. I know gay people coming out today and their parents really struggle with it, really really struggle with it and even if they come round in the end there is no way they go oh yay you’re gay its fine.
“It’s not a ten-minute conversation. It’s still a massive problem today sometimes for cultural reasons sometimes for religious reasons.
“I know because I do a lot of charity events and I go to a lot of LGBT+ events and I still to this day have people in their early 20s coming up to me telling me their woes because they’ve just come out to their family and their family has been very hostile.
“Why does Albert Kennedy Trust still need to exist?
“Because young people today are still getting thrown out the house by their parents.”
