In 1999, Russell T Davies was responsible for the now-canonical drama Queer as Folk, which followed the lives of three men living in Manchester’s gay village. Explicit, unapologetic and joyful, it felt like a radical show even in the late 1990s. Davies has often chronicled queer lives since then, most recently in the Bafta-winning It’s a Sin, but now he returns to the city’s Canal Street in less than celebratory mood. Tip Toe is much more akin to his politically prescient near-future BBC drama Years And Years, from 2019. It is bleak, it is damning, and most of all, it is furious.
Alan Cumming and David Morrissey star as neighbours Leo and Clive, two middle-aged men whose long-held antipathy towards one another eventually bubbles over into a vicious and deadly feud. It opens with a scene of horror, almost a still life, with a body swinging from a lamppost, before a woman screams the word “monster” into a silent suburban street. Over five increasingly fraught and harrowing episodes, it reveals how it could possibly have come to this.
For Davies, the gloves are off. This is about misinformation and online scapegoating, and what happens when both are weaponised by people who feel aggrieved and hard done by. The show sets out its central thesis early on, in a conversation between Leo, who runs a gay bar on Canal Street, and his long-time friend Melba (Paul Rhys). Both are gay men who grew up in harder times; they reminisce about receiving “those calls”, letting them know that friends had been diagnosed with HIV, or had died of Aids. As intolerance, homophobia and hatred reassert themselves in mainstream society, however, Melba has once again made himself small, and now “tip toes” into rooms. Leo, meanwhile, says that he has done his time on the political frontline: “Now it’s someone else’s turn.”
