Gary Matthews died from Covid after posting conspiracies denying the virus existed.
Marianna Spring visits Peter Roscoe and Geoff Hardy at their townhouse in Shrewsbury, overlooking the River Severn, to learn about their friendship with Gary Matthews. Peter and Geoff, who have been together since 1980, met during anti-fascist activism in South East London, where Peter wore a 'gays against Nazis' badge to his International Socialist meetings. They moved to Shrewsbury in the early 1980s partly to escape the AIDS epidemic, which had killed many of their friends in London. They met Gary around the poetry section of a bookshop, describing him as dreamy and 'in a bubble.' He later turned up on their doorstep selling the Socialist Worker newspaper, and they became a surrogate family of sorts. They helped him through cancer in his twenties, introduced him to queer community life, and took him on walks in the Shropshire Hills. Gary had experienced homophobic bullying at school despite not being gay, which gave him empathy for people on the margins. Over time, they noticed his political convictions hardening around issues like Bashar al-Assad's Syria, where he dismissed mainstream accounts as brainwashing. His openness to debate gave way to certainty and a dismissiveness toward people who disagreed. When the pandemic arrived and lockdowns prevented their regular meetings, Gary's online activity intensified — family members recall him posting dozens of times daily. Peter and Geoff witnessed his COVID denial harden, noting he attended London protests without a mask even around masked friends. They draw a pointed parallel between his refusal to protect himself and gay men in the 1980s ignoring AIDS risks. Lockdown removed the in-person check of their conversations, which might have moderated his views. They reflect that Gary always knew what he wasn't but struggled to know who he was, leading him toward communities that offered certainty and belonging. In December 2020 they did not send Gary a Christmas card — the first time in decades of friendship. In January 2021 Peter received a message that Gary had died. He describes hearing the news as a 'watery heaviness' in his chest, mixed with anger that the death was preventable. Peter and Geoff describe Gary's apparent final movements: leaving his flat while ill, walking to Shire Hall (the county council building where COVID tests were available) rather than a hospital, and seemingly never seeking further medical help after testing positive. After his death, Peter found Gary's Facebook page flooded with posts from people he didn't know celebrating Gary as a martyr to COVID denial. Peter felt sick that strangers were 'using his death as some sort of rallying point,' and that Gary's real friends and family were being hurt. Many of those posts came from the Shropshire Corona Resilience Network, a local COVID-denial Facebook group. The episode ends with a teaser for the next instalment, in which Spring attends one of their protests.
