Patrick Walters, the producer of TV hit Heartstopper, was in the throes of first love when his apparently healthy partner died in his sleep. Josh’s heart had just stopped beating, with no obvious cause. How close are we to understanding ‘sudden arrhythmic death syndrome’?
Patrick Walters was 21 when he met his first love, Josh Shotton, at a gay night in Oxford. “When he first came up to me, there was a fairytale quality to it,” says Walters. The pair didn’t cross paths again until Walters had finished university and returned to London. “He came to my 23rd birthday party,” says Walters, “and I remember thinking he was the most gorgeous person I’d ever seen, so cool and confident. We had this amazing night where we stayed up talking, getting to know each other. It all moved quickly after that, and we went into an overwhelmingly passionate and romantic relationship.”
Walters, now 35, is a television and film producer, and has just started rehearsals for the second season of the Netflix show Heartstopper – a cockle-warming coming-of-age romcom about the love between two grammar-school boys. When he and Shotton got together, Walters was fresh out of an internship and working as an assistant at a production company. Shotton, he says, “was very clever and encouraging. He was magical and had an indefinable sweetness. He was kind of quiet, but because he went to the gym he was muscular and good-looking. And he had a silliness to him, but also a robustness.”
