Richard Coles: Heartstopper is the Netflix hit I wish I’d seen as a boy

Even as a teenager, teenage love was not a compelling subject for me. I preferred the tortured tragic figures of Macbeth or Hedda Gabler to the star-crossed lovers of Romeo and Juliet. As a nerdy gay boy in Kettering, Northamptonshire in the late Seventies, my teenage romantic dramas were ones of unfulfilment. I spent many Saturday nights at roller discos in the drill hall, at young farmers’ barn dances and beagle balls, watching my peers getting off with girls from the Pony Club and Overstone School, feeling like an Amish at the Monaco Grand Prix.

Worst was when those getting off included boys for whom I had developed secret colossal crushes. Declaring my infatuations was unthinkable, so I had to absorb disappointment and disguise