The 20th anniversary will be celebrated later this week with a concert at Manchester’s Albert Hall at which the soundtrack’s house and disco hits will be performed by a live orchestra: a fitting tribute if a touch decorous. (Photo: Channel 4)Īll of their lives pivoted around nights out.

Especially when gratuitously dousing himself in mineral water. And above all, there was Stuart (Aidan Gillen), the snake-hipped Irish cad, who from his impossibly roomy loft apartment to his penchant for wearing V-neck sweaters with no T-shirt underneath, was a fantasy of late-capitalist decadence. There was Vince (Craig Kelly), the sweet supermarket manager who seemed to represent the hope of normalisation. There was Nathan (Charlie Hunnam), the schoolboy fulfilling all ones teenage dreams with his initiation into “the scene”. Why is Young Adult fiction still so afraid of gay sex? And yet here was a programme that was aspirational rather than cautionary, with a central trio who played to different and conflicting facets of desire.

We were an in-between generation, too young to have experienced the Aids crisis and yet very much growing up in its shadow. Which was exactly what made it so alluring to many of us who were just coming of age. Interestingly, as Davies recently noted in a recent interview with the New Statesman, the gay press was equally as put out as the Daily Mail: not because of the orifices, of course, but because the favoured gay subject of Aids barely got a look in. That first episode satisfied the bloodlust, of course, with its one-stop introduction to the pleasures of anal sex – and “rimming”, in particular. All with teeth and knives bared,” as Davies has recalled. Normally, they are attended by 20 jaded journalists, 30 if you’re providing wine. “The first indication of what was to come was at the press launch. We were an in-between generation, too young to have experienced the Aids crisis and yet very much growing up in its shadow

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