SOLVED. Adult fiction and also '80s TV drama in UK, about a family whose husband/father is diagnosed with AIDS after sleeping with prostitutes. [s]

[Sarah]

This was both a TV four-parter and a book, back in the '80s; the TV show was better known and if anyone knows of a similar forum to this for asking about old TV shows then I might have more luck there, but it was also a book and maybe someone from the UK in the '80s will remember it.

Anyway, the basic plot is as above, and it came out at the time that AIDS was widely thought of as 'a gay disease' and was meant to illustrate that it can affect ordinary families. The idea is that this middle-aged middle-class married man catches HIV from a one-night stand with a prostitute, and it's only discovered when he becomes ill with AIDS. One criticism made of the show was the way the man criticised the prostitute as being 'filthy and diseased' when he found out what had happened.

Other things I remember: The wife's name was Ruth. She didn't catch AIDS as they'd been using condoms for contraception; there was a line where the doctor asks about this and the husband says 'Ruth came off the pill after the concerns about it and I took care of all that side of things'.

The family had two children; the girl was just about to leave school and I think the boy was older. The girl fails her A-levels (UK exams) and no-one cares as much as they normally would have due to the concerns over her father. There's a scene where she says to her brother "I'm never going near another A-level as long as I live. Someone should have stopped me taking them in the first place. *You* were brilliant, remember? I was 'good with people'." She gets a job with a photographer called Nicky and has an affair with him.

The family faces stigma from the community due to AIDS being so little understood. There's a scene where Ruth is with a group of friends and one of them refuses to use a cup Ruth might have used.

Ruth becomes involved in AIDS activism and gets to know a single father whose son has haemophilia and contacted AIDS through a blood transfusion. She and the father have a one-night stand at one point when Ruth feels she's missed out on passion. I think either the father or the son was called Fraser.

As I recall, the husband is dead by the end.

Oh, and I've checked the listopia of AIDS books and can't see it on there.

Anyway, it's bugging me that I can't think of the name. Anyone recognise this?

[Becca]

It sounds like Intimate Contact, but the Wikipedia page doesn't mention it being based on a book - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intimat...

[Sarah]

That's the one! Thank you! Here's the book: Intimate Contact.

I strongly suspect it was the other way round and the book was based on the TV series, so it was probably a bit cheeky of me asking here, but I figured it was technically a book! Anyway, thanks so much for remembering; that has been bugging me.

[Becca]

Ah, that makes sense! Glad I could help. Well done for remembering the wife's name after all this time!