Yahoo Finance La! Russell T Davies shares the story behind the It’s A Sin gang’s in-joke
Olly Alexander and Lydia West in It’s A Sin
(Channel 4)If you’ve watched Russell T Davies’ new Channel 4 series It’s A Sin, you’ll have fallen head over heels for Ritchie, Ash, Roscoe, Jill and lovely Colin (sob).
The five-part drama is the first TV series to explore Britain’s Aids crisis in the 80s, yet despite the devastating subject matter, Davies devotes plenty of time to the characters’ more joyful moments too. From their nicknames to their affectionate disparagement of one another, his script ensures that the inhabitants of the Pink Palace are instantly believable as a group of friends - complete with their very own in-jokes.
The simplest of these is their habit of punctuating conversations with “La!” which shifts in meaning as the series moves through the decade and the characters get older, but always acts as a reminder of their friendship and shared history. The show’s cast seem to have adopted it too, with many of them tweeting it before the show premiered on Friday evening, and it’s inevitably since spawned a hashtag.
Speaking on It’s A Sin: After Hours, a companion series for the show that airs on social media after each episode goes out on Channel 4, Davies explained that he rooted the group’s catchphrase in his own experiences as a youngster in youth theatre.
“I did that as a little camp kid in Swansea,” he revealed. “Me and my gang of mates, when we were teenagers all belonged to the same youth theatre and that was one of our jokes.
“There [are] some people out there who I haven’t seen for years who might watch this and go, ‘I used to do that, I used to go, La!’ How they explain that to their wives, I would love to know.”
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— Callum Scott Howells (@callumshowells) January 22, 2021
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— olly alexander ✨ (@alexander_olly) January 22, 2021
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— Nathaniel Curtis (@nathancurtis90) January 22, 2021
“I put it in because that’s how groups of friends work and I don’t think you ever see that often enough on television and in films,” he added.
“The groups of people who spend a lot of time together who have these jokes and codes and in-jokes, they might have a funny way of saying ‘thank you’, or little nicknames for each other, like this lot feminise each other’s names which we all used to do as little gay kids back in the 1980s.”
Noting the shift in tone from the buoyant “La!”s of the opening episodes to the sadness that creeps in later, Davies added: “As the decade goes on it wears out actually, as in-jokes do, it gets slightly forgotten, but I wanted to do that to make them feel a bit more real.”
It’s A Sin continues on Channel 4 at 9pm on Fridays; all episodes are available to stream on All4
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