17 June 2020

Why BBC Radio 4’s Aids documentary hits home today

With countless sharp and memorable remarks on both activism and a public health crisis, ten-part series A Big Disease with a Little Name sounds stunningly apposite.

By Antonia Quirke

In this picture from January 1995 Andres, HIV positive, stays resting in his bed. The anti-retroviral medicine started to be distributed freely on 2004 in Peru supported by the Global Fund to fight Aids,Tuberculosis and Malaria. The fund will start it's withdrawall in 2008. No state measure has been taken yet to assure the continuity of the free distribution of the anti-retroviral medicine. AFP PHOTO/Jaime RAZURI (Photo credit should read JAIME RAZURI/AFP via Getty Images)

With countless sharp and memorable remarks on both activism and a public health crisis, this ten-part series about the emergence and arc of the Aids epidemic (omnibuses air 12 and 19 June, 9pm) sounded stunningly apposite. We heard from patients, nurses, doctors, scientists, with every short episode concentrating on one story.

Each narrator spoke frankly about the first incidents of the virus – young, healthy men inexplicably drenched in eternal sweat – or of the shockingly high death rates. A doctor recalled that just one of his early patients survived. (“I cannot think of an infectious disease that has anything like that mortality. Smallpox killed less than 40 per cent of those it infected.”) The suicide rate among partners of the dead was unusually high. Having nursed their lover through their final illness many men had to face their own death alone, after intimately observing how agonising it would get. (“That’s a particularly unique and painful aspect… not replicated in other diseases.”)

So many striking images and facts. Here’s one: Reagan didn’t say the word “Aids” until four years into the epidemic. But some episodes were near euphoric: such as one about the furiously effective US campaigning group ACT UP, who fought to lower the price of the drug AZT, used to delay development of Aids in HIV patients. They described infiltrating the headquarters of pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome in North Carolina using fake IDs, carrying electric drills in briefcases, and employing the sorts of negotiations that made me think Dog Day Afternoon. With added fun.

As one lesbian activist sighed, “There was a lot of joy in that group.”

But as the series went on, spanning the past two weeks, certain declarations increasingly hit home. “Stop killing us”; “If they don’t start listening to our community then we will be back”; “Silence equals death”. As each episode was broadcast straight after World at One, it was impossible not to focus on the recurring language of activism, the very shape of certain phrases. Voices merging and raised against a litany of callous policies. Greed and prejudice and occasional victories. A series that sounded like burning magnesium.