Russell T Davies: ‘I campaigned for gay visibility my whole life – now I feel like an idiot’
We are two episodes into Tip Toe, but already we know how the Channel 4 drama will end: with Leo, a gay bar owner played by Alan Cumming, murdered, hanged from a lamp post outside his own house. “It’s a clear statement of intent,” says the show’s creator, Russell T Davies, of why he chose to open every episode with the shocking, violent denouement. “There’s no tricks. We are remorselessly heading towards this event.”
Tip Toe is Davies’s first drama for Channel 4 since 2021’s triumphant It’s a Sin, the bold, heartbreaking tale of young queer people living through the Aids crisis in 80s London. In this new five-parter, the action is brought right up to the modern day in Manchester, where Leo and his neighbour Clive (David Morrissey) are finding their lives increasingly intertwined.
Despite having lived next to each other for the past 15 years, the men had barely interacted until that fateful morning in episode one, when Leo was locked out of his house in his underpants and had to ask Clive – a hardened, masculine and homophobic electrician – for help. And so began the fall of dominoes that would eventually lead to Leo’s lynching.
It’s been reported that Davies was inspired by the rise of Reform and Nigel Farage’s rhetoric to write Tip Toe, but that’s only a fraction of the truth. “They are just mouthpieces for any cause they can grab hold of. It was the online world generally really,” he says. “All Reform does is listen to what people are saying on X, whether it’s ‘we hate women’ or ‘we hate farmers’.” Davies hates the way the online conversation has spun out of control so much that when he worked with the BBC on Doctor Who, he demanded that they stop publicising the show on X.
“It’s a public service broadcaster posting on a hate platform,” he says. “It’s not the town square it pretends to be. It’s a privately owned hate platform, owned by a megalomaniac [Elon Musk] who is pushing ill on many of us. The tone of voice on X is becoming our tone of voice in every single discussion ever made. I think it’s creeping into the real world – and we’re just letting it happen.”
It’s this insidious “creeping” that we see in Tip Toe. As Clive and Leo’s lives are braided together, it soon becomes clear that Clive – who spends his spare time watching violent videos online – has no qualms about letting his prejudices known, particularly when it comes to meeting his neighbour’s transgender employees.
Davies points to the online “trans debate” as a specific catalyst for writing this series. “I completely accept that there are two sides,” he says. “But who’s doing any research? Who’s doing any thought? Where’s the nuance in either side of the argument? I’m meeting trans people who live in terror.” He remembers a trans couple who approached him at a book signing and told him they were scared to leave their house. “That’s when I decided I had to go and do something. Specifically trans people, but actually, it’s happening to all of us [the LGBTQ+ community].”
Despite being one of the most celebrated and respected figures in British TV, Davies has personally felt the tide of public opinion turning against gay people. “I’ve had things happen on my doorstep, and I’ve had things happen at work,” he says. Understandably, he doesn’t want such instances repeated in a national newspaper for fear of spreading yet more hatred. “They all happened only in the last five years.”
Tip Toe director Peter Hoar has also borne the brunt of online homophobia in the past few years, thanks to his Emmy-nominated episode of The Last of Us, which centered on a gay couple. “I was personally attacked online by some religious newspaper in America and there were quite a few reviews saying the director must be ‘f**king this or that’,” says Hoar.
The experiences have made Davies introspective, even self-doubting. In 1999, Davies created one of the most groundbreaking TV series of all time: Queer as Folk. The series was the first of its kind, unapologetically and honestly portraying what it was really like to live as a gay man in turn-of-the-century Britain. Now, Davies wonders if his efforts towards LGBTQ+ visibility were a mistake. “All our lives we’ve campaigned to be more visible, and I never thought what the end result of that was,” he says. “Now I look at myself like I’m an idiot. As if I ever imagined we’d reach a harmonious society. Our visibility is being weaponised.”
One particularly disturbing storyline in Tip Toe emerges when Clive becomes convinced that Leo is having a sexual relationship with his 16-year-old son. The homophobic conspiracy theory linking paedophilia and homosexuality has persisted for decades, utilised by far-right groups to paint the LGBTQ+ community as “groomers”.
“I think where prejudice and offence come from is that a childhood notion is being disrupted,” says Davies. “We grow up seeing mums and dads everywhere – that’s forged into you at three years old. If something disrupts that, you can react quite violently.” He likens it to the offence caused by Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, which was banned in his hometown of Swansea. “It took the iconography that you learned your childhood and f**ked with it,” he says. “If I was a homophobic man, I’d think, ‘My young self is being f**ked with,’ creating a link where you think the young self has been f**ked. I think it’s simple as that.”
In spite of Davies’s bleak outlook on the world and the series’ devastating ending, the writer has still infused Tip Toe with his signature brand of queer joy. The scenes of Leo holding court in his Canal Street bar are magnificent, worlds away from the fear and oppression he can feel through the walls of his own home. “We wanted Canal Street to be beautiful, because it is – there’s lights and glitter everywhere,” says Hoar. “We’ve created heaven. But it lulls you into a false sense of security.”
Davies rejects the idea that he might be contributing to the dramatic trope of depicting LGBTQ+ lives as miserable. “Well, I’ve never seen a happy drama. Dramas are made of conflict and trouble and stress,” he says. “And in fairness to me, look how well I’ve written for all these years: no drug problems, no divorces, no sex workers murdered in alleyways. I’m actually very, very proud of the stuff I’ve written that doesn’t plumb those depths.”
In fact, the last time Davies wrote a political series, the positive impact was measurable: the Terrence Higgins Trust reported a huge upswing in HIV testing. But this time he questions whether anyone will heed the warnings peppered throughout Tip Toe. “It’s an eye-opener,” he says. “Whether a piece of television can change anyone’s mind in any way, shape or form… I wish. I’ve been writing all these shows for years and it’s got worse.”
He is keen, however, for Tip Toe not to be pigeonholed as a story that only relates to the LGBTQ+ community. “I can’t think what straight person wouldn’t say that the world isn’t getting worse,” he says. “We’re too late for the Jewish version of this drama. There needs to be a disability version of this drama. Women are watching rape laws going down the toilet; white, straight men are angry, following Tommy Robinson on those marches. The anger and the sourness belongs to everyone.
“That’s what we’re talking about here: corrosion.”
‘Tip Toe’ continues on Sunday at 9pm on Channel 4
