Classic Horizons
May. 24th, 2014 02:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovingbothIt's only available on the BBC website (and via get_iplayer) but as part of the Horizon's 50th anniversary, they've got a few of the most memorable ones, including 1983's Killer in the Village, one of the first programmes on Aids.
It opens with in London at an early fundraiser for the then new 'Terry Higgins Trust' (he's named as having died, but they don't use the Trust's name), and ends back at it wondering if there were going to be many more deaths in the UK: "Aids has already arrived in Britain - do we already have the seeds of a hidden epidemic here?"
The middle is all from the Americas, including an appearance by Bobbi Campbell. Not named, but on the map of sexual contacts of early victims, is Gaëtan Dugas.
The b-word doesn't appear once either, but it was the bits about promiscuity that were very controversial at the time. Sample of both, talking about the people at a Los Angeles 'lesbian and gay' clinic: "No lesbians: women have more stable relationships and less disease if they avoid men."
It also didn't shy away from talking about anal sex, poppers, and sex clubs - the New York door shown is The Mineshaft's.
It's before the discovery of HIV, and it's striking to be reminded how little was known. As well as homosexual (sic) men, heroin addicts, Haitians and haemophiliacs, there's also the ex-wife of a heroin addict and it's noted that she wasn't diagnosed over a year after she left her husband, demonstrating both that women can get it and there's a long period between infection and the disease becoming noticeable - both used to develop the Bisexual Threat to get action on Aids here.
There's also 1978's Now the Chips are Down on microprocessors, but if you're my age you got shown that so many times you can probably recite it by heart...
It opens with in London at an early fundraiser for the then new 'Terry Higgins Trust' (he's named as having died, but they don't use the Trust's name), and ends back at it wondering if there were going to be many more deaths in the UK: "Aids has already arrived in Britain - do we already have the seeds of a hidden epidemic here?"
The middle is all from the Americas, including an appearance by Bobbi Campbell. Not named, but on the map of sexual contacts of early victims, is Gaëtan Dugas.
The b-word doesn't appear once either, but it was the bits about promiscuity that were very controversial at the time. Sample of both, talking about the people at a Los Angeles 'lesbian and gay' clinic: "No lesbians: women have more stable relationships and less disease if they avoid men."
It also didn't shy away from talking about anal sex, poppers, and sex clubs - the New York door shown is The Mineshaft's.
It's before the discovery of HIV, and it's striking to be reminded how little was known. As well as homosexual (sic) men, heroin addicts, Haitians and haemophiliacs, there's also the ex-wife of a heroin addict and it's noted that she wasn't diagnosed over a year after she left her husband, demonstrating both that women can get it and there's a long period between infection and the disease becoming noticeable - both used to develop the Bisexual Threat to get action on Aids here.
There's also 1978's Now the Chips are Down on microprocessors, but if you're my age you got shown that so many times you can probably recite it by heart...
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Date: 2014-05-24 07:20 am (UTC)Tangent: this and having just read an Audre Lorde book of essays make teenaged-me's choice of labels make much more sense. I called myself lesbian as well as bisexual, never with any intention of not sleeping with men. From the point of view of now, that seems weird: lesbian and bisexual are seen as distinct categories. In the usage of the seventies/eighties, "lesbian" seems quite clearly to mean "woman who has sex with women" without making a statement about whether they have sex with men too. That's the way I was using the label from the early nineties, when most of what was available to read was from the eighties.
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Date: 2014-05-25 09:45 pm (UTC)As for Horizon - how good is it now? I gave up on it a few years back, when it seemed happy to dumb down all science to a level.. well, John Craven would've been ashamed. But, as we see, they're capable of some stunning portrayals of science. I remain fond of the followup they made of Pons & Fleischmann's work, crudely painted as "cold fusion". Subsequent experiments confirm there are some quite odd effects in play, sometimes highly energetically, even if not of a magical new energy source nature.