‘Private Things Affect Other People’: Grange Hill’s Critique of British Sex Education Policy in the Age of AIDS

The article explores five key episodes of Grange Hill, which focused on HIV/AIDS and sex education in the context of the development of sex education policy under the Thatcher and Major governments and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) children’s television provision. This addresses the BBC’s and the government’s conceptualization of childhood and specifically its intentions for, and assumptions about, the audience who watched Grange Hill in 1995. Having placed these key episodes in context, the article then reveals the didactic intent behind them, outlining their effects through a close textual analysis focused on the representation of sex education and HIV/AIDS stigma. The multiple narrative techniques deployed by Grange Hill’s creators receives particular scrutiny, allowing the article to expose how this storyline represented a culmination, response, and an intervention into the British politics of children’s AIDS education that preceded and surrounded it.