Russell T Davies turned his anger into a heart-breaking new drama: ‘We released a demon’

Russell T. Davies is a very angry man. 

Not at me, I should say – although if he ever read Metro’s Doctor Who coverage, that might be understandable. 

No, when I walked into a glitzy central London office to chat with him and David Morrissey (I’d later have a Zoom call with the show’s other star, Alan Cumming) about their new drama Tip Toe, he was charm personified. 

He spent the first five minutes of our interview complimenting my shirt, saying how well I looked, and asking how I’d lost so much weight.

Honestly, if you can’t afford therapy, I recommend spending five minutes in his company. I promise you’ll come away smiling.

And yet beneath the bonhomie was a palpable fury and an even deeper sadness. 

But that makes sense because Tip Toe, his heartbreaking new drama, is an angry show.

Set in Manchester, the series follows the growing feud between the out and proud Leo (Cumming) and his prejudiced neighbour Clive (Morrissey).

What starts as a simple antipathy, though, quickly grows into something far more violent and despicable.

To say more would spoil the fun (or horror), but it’s a powerful show about radicalisation, misinformation, and the dangers the queer community faces.

So how do I know Davies was angry when he wrote it? Well, he told me.

‘I was angry,’ he told Metro when I asked where the show came from. ‘I remember writing It’s A Sin, and very consciously removing the anger out of that.’

‘So I took anger out, and then I wrote this because I was getting angry, because I’m getting scared as well.’

That fear, as will become clear to those who watch Tip Toe, is driven by an unshakable feeling that we’re backsliding into an entirely unpleasant world.

A world where the small territorial victories the queer community has won are being undone as new theatres in the seemingly endless culture war open one after another.

In the show, this is expressed through Melba, a weary older gay man who Davies jokes is something of an author’s avatar and ‘the soothsayer of ancient Rome ringing the bells of doom.’

‘I’m living in a world in which I’m much more out than I ever would have been 30 years ago,’ he explained. ‘Yet I can feel the walls closing in.’

Who’s to blame for this claustrophobia? Well, Davies points the finger at plenty of people: the growing boldness of the far-right, wealthy conservatives funding hatred, and, most of all, social media.

‘I think it’s entirely due to this online voice that people are free to say whatever they want now,’ he told me.

The moment they decided that those platforms had no monitoring, no responsibility for the society in which they speak, we released a demon. I think we’re in a great deal of trouble.

‘My trans friends are feeling terror at the edges of their days.’

Indeed, if Tip Toe has one thing going for it, it’s how effectively Davies makes the viewer feel that terror.

In fact, I don’t mind saying that by the time I finished Tip Toe on the morning of our interview, I was in floods of tears.

Of course, it’s worth noting that Tip Toe is not a polemic.

What makes it so effective is that Davies knows how to balance the sensational and the recognisable.

Which is why it, rather bravely, goes out of its way to make sure Clive isn’t some rabid homophobic caricature. He’s a real man in every sense of the word.

‘The whole piece for me is very human,’ Morrissey explained. ‘People want someone to be totally evil, to condemn them out of hand, and when they empathise with them, they’re troubled.’

For Morrissey, Clive isn’t a monster; he’s just the product of a society that tells you male intimacy is wrong, suspicious and deviant.

‘I feel that the only acceptable times men can be physically intimate with each other is via violence,’ he said. ‘They can do horse play and stuff, but there’s violence behind it.

‘There’s something about Clive where he has no physical intimacy, and that has taken him to such a dark place, to where this violence has to come out. He’s a pressure cooker.’

Sadly, the target of that violence is Leo, a funny, flamboyant and fearless man who finds himself the target of his neighbours’ growing ire.

In lesser hands, Leo would have been a simple victim, but Cummings plays him as a larger-than-life character who refuses to be made small in the face of an openly hostile world.

‘Why should he?’ Cumming said when I asked whether Leo’s refusal to stay quiet was brave or reckless. ‘He is existing in his community, and he has a right to do that.’

Sadly, that refusal to be anything less than himself for even a moment comes at a cost.

For all of Leo’s joie de vivre, Tip Toe makes clear that queer people are expected to tiptoe through life to stay safe.

‘Heteronormativity is definitely a thing,’ Cumming told me. ‘There are still certain ways that queer people interact, and they’re told to keep in the shadows.

‘I think [Tip Toe] show that assimilation isn’t really working.’

That tension, then, is what gives this show its sense of dread. A certainty that disaster is coming from the first few minutes of the first episode.

And that, ultimately, is what makes Tip Toe such a difficult watch because I think beneath its writer’s anger at a world closing in on him, Clive’s fury at being denied intimacy, and Leo’s ferocious refusal to make himself small lurks the profound sadness Davies mentioned early in our chat.

It’s a grief that the world is becoming less safe for people just trying to exist.

Or, like Davies said, the feeling that ‘the walls are slowly closing in’.

Tip Toe will premiere on Channel 4 at 9pm on Sunday, 31 May

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