In the 1980s, the British government’s “don’t die of ignorance” public health campaign about the emerging Aids epidemic seemed to be on every time you turned on the television.

The ad campaign was crude and unsophisticated: shot in the grainy black and white of a sci-fi movie, it featured volcanoes, tombstones, a chisel chipping away at granite, and an ominous voiceover by John Hurt. In the final frame, a bunch of lilies are tossed unceremoniously onto a fallen headstone. At one point, there had been talk of possibly opening it with the sound of a nuclear warning siren – a suggestion then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher wisely over-ruled.

It was sensationalist, unforgettable and brutal. And it was brutally effective. Leaflets were sent to 23 million homes; the purpose of the TV campaign was to make sure people read them. Later research suggested 98 per cent of the British public understood how HIV was transmitted. “Scaring people was deliberate,” its creator, Malcolm Gaskin, told The Guardian in 2017.

The price, as we now know, for invoking such terror in the general public was paid by the people left to die alone in hospital, with no loved one to hold their hand. Forty years on, we have a much better understanding of the lives ravaged first by diagnosis and illness, and then again by stigma and shame.

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