It's National HIV testing week and Olly Alexander raises awareness.

The it's a Sin star tells us to celebrate progress and take a test to know our status

In his latest Instagram and Twitter post Olly talks about how we have advanced since the 1980's when the Channel 4 programme was set.

Olly said: ‘There are a couple of similarities between me and Ritchie, but one really big difference is that he is living in London in the 1980s and more and more people around him are starting to get sick and die.

‘That was Aids then and I’d like to talk about HIV now. There has been amazing progress in the fight against this virus thanks to the early activists who fought for research, for funding, for humanity. People just like Jill, and Ash, and Elizabeth in our show.’ He continued: ‘This means today we have PrEP, a pill that you can take to stop you contracting HIV. We have effective medication that stops you getting sick if you are HIV-positive, and stops you from passing it on to any partners – and, unlike in 1985, it’s now super, super easy to order an HIV test, you can do it online, you can do it at home and get the results really quickly.’

He previously spoke about the series, "as a young gay man I was scared of AIDs because we were not allowed to talk about being gay at school,

‘The series has given me a lot of understanding of what that period was like, it’s legacy, and a lot of context as to who I am. It has been interesting.’

It's a Sin has broken records after 6.5million have watched it, and it has been named the most binged new series ever!

Olly mentions going to https://www.tht.org.uk/ to start the process of your HIV testing.