Russell T Davies new drama, Tip Toe, starring Alan Cumming, David Morrissey, Paul Rhys, Jackson Connor, Elizabeth Berrington, Clare Calbraith, Iz Hesketh and Denise Welch, is now showing on Channel 4.
There is a line in episode one of Russell T Davies new drama Tip Toe on Channel 4 that many in the LGBTQ+ and other minority communities will immediately resonate with: “I used to walk into rooms and go, ta-daa! Now I walk on tip toe. In case I get seen.” It’s a feeling that has been growing over the past five years, and one, as someone who grew up gay in the ’90s, that sends a shiver down my spine. It’s clearly a feeling that also worries and unnerves Russell T Davies as he talks culture wars, intolerance and the need for us to face a growing darkness in our society
Emmy, Dorian and Tony award-winner Alan Cumming plays Leo, a vivid, funny and dynamic character who owns and runs a bar called Spit & Polish in Manchester’s Gay Village. But while the bar is a haven of humour and community, home life is trickier, as BAFTA-nominated and RTS-winner David Morrissey’s Clive, Leo’s next-door neighbour, makes his feelings and opinions clear on Leo’s sexuality, lifestyle and his job.
Words become weapons, opinions become radicalised, and, gradually, two neighbours become deadly enemies in a tense suburban thriller that challenges everything we consider safe. The series, populated with a cast of vibrant characters and underscored by Davies’ trademark wit and deft humour, is an urgent tale that brings a spotlight to bear on the prejudices creeping back into our lives.
Q: How did the idea for Tip Toe come to you?
The story started very simply, with me giving my neighbour my front door key. I’m away a lot, parcels get delivered, and they sit there like an advert for your house to be burgled, so you give your neighbour a key. Now, my neighbour is lovely, but as a storyteller, you start thinking… what happens when somebody else has access to your home? We have these fortresses. That’s gone. It’s about how vulnerable you feel, how porous the house suddenly is.
That was in my head. So, you would’ve got a neighbours-at-war story out of me at some point, regardless. At the same time, in my heart, I have my reaction to the way the world is going. It’s not simply politics; it’s everything, everyone, everywhere. Our intolerance, our temper, our shortness, our anger. It’s just rising and rising, undoubtedly because of the way we are communicating, which is in these short bursts of indelible text.
We didn’t evolve to communicate this way. It’s a whiplash world; somehow, it all leads to trouble, and the LGBTQIA+ community always seems to end up as the ones to blame. You can guarantee that whenever there’s an election, wherever it is, we will pop up and become a front-line issue. I say this as a perfectly happy, white, cisgender gay man. If you’re trans, God help you. Partly, this comes from me wondering why television doesn’t talk about this stuff all the time. All of this was focused on this show called Tip Toe.
Q: How did the central feuding characters of Leo Struthers and Clive Goss come to you?
I started building them both from the front-door key idea. Different versions of the same thing – which is essentially loneliness – on different sides of the same wall. You’ve got Leo, who is gay, 59 years old, staring at 60, newly single after his boyfriend leaves him for a relationship with a woman. It’s a fairly amicable divorce. They’re still in touch. He’s the owner of a bar on Canal Street. So, he is surrounded by younger people.
Clive Goss is 60, has a wife and two sons, and a history he is both suffering under and inventing at the same time. He’s equally lonely. One of them is in an empty house, the other in a full house, but they’re as lonely as each other. Leo is going to survive in this world. He’s got his faults. He has his arrogance, and he doesn’t take some things seriously enough. He does that older man’s thing of sexualising things too much in a time when you do have to be careful with your words. And he’s coasting a little bit. There is an arrogance to him.
Q: Was it important to have empathy for both men?
Yes, of course. I have a history of creating quite unlikeable lead characters—Stuart in Queer as Folk, Henry in Cucumber. I love giving these people faults. Every straight writer has been free to do that forever. Gay writers aren’t always so free. Alan is so brilliant at communicating that constant awareness that gay men of a certain age have, the potential for things to go wrong any minute. He’s a confident, happy, sunny man, but all the clocks are ticking beneath his surface. His loneliness emerges with stealth. Both performances, that of Alan as Leo and David as Clive, are powerful, sustained character studies. Lovely, great supporting characters circle them both, but really, Tip Toe is about these two men.
Q: Clive Goss feels like the first time you’ve addressed ‘straight culture’ so head-on.
That was my challenge for this, with the two neighbours. I needed to be as fair to Clive, to make it as much his story as it is Leo’s. Clive has no one to talk to, and he’s falling into that online trap. Where other people are accessing porn, he’s watching real deaths online. He is brutalising himself. He’s got no one to turn to, no one to talk to, and he’s got a romantic streak. Those moments when David chooses to smile, sunlight shines onto the screen.
There’s really a truly beautiful Clive hidden away there somewhere. Yet here he is, with two sons, having to act like the dad while falling behind in the world’s politics and everything his sons are doing. He believes the stuff he’s taking in online. Not just the stuff about trans and queer rights, but also the terrible, terrible connection that he is trying to draw between homosexuality and paedophilia. He subscribes to these myths. He’s finding his own ‘proof’ for it. Yet he is trying to work hard; he is clever. And what a performance David gives. It’s a masterclass.
Q: How do you bring drama about such massive subjects into localised focus?
Well, that is part of what I love about Tip Toe. That, in a world of ghosts and monsters and wars and blockbusters, a drama like this can revolve around the wrong placement of a glass in a cabinet. It isn’t where it should be. This is a reflection of the world we live in at the moment, where a single text message can undermine you and where everything has massive consequences. Where something you said six years ago won’t stop echoing and echoing, no matter how hard you try to stop it. This drama is made up of tiny, tiny things, just like our lives. Every word is weaponised, every thought exaggerated, every prejudice confirmed.
Q: Which all plays into the thriller element of Tip Toe?
Exactly. Alan was sold the idea over Zoom before he’d seen a word of it. David was brought into our orbit as I was starting to write it. There’s a great pressure in casting great lead actors. So I started looking more and more closely at Clive’s life, job, and marriage.
Q: How does the show stop being polemic?
That’s very hard. There’s a great problem when a drama becomes an “issue” drama because that label becomes its only distinguishing feature. It’s amazing how, when it comes to political issues, people’s comprehension can go out the window. But Tip Toe is a really good thriller, and it was important to hold on to that throughout the writing. Even in a scene where the characters talk about pronouns, it is not really about pronouns. It’s about two men not getting on and the consequences of where that might end up.
Q: Tip Toe will undoubtedly become a lightning rod for the culture wars. Was there anywhere you didn’t want to go?
Nowhere. I think you can see me just absolutely going for it. It was about my anger and fascination with all this stuff that led me to write it in the first place, and, in all fairness to Channel 4, we pre-warned them, told them exactly what this was about, and they were lovely about it. Having received the script, they commissioned it in seven days. They recognised the urgency of it.
Q: Talk to me about the young cast and Canal St in 2026. Is a bar like Spit and Polish as much of a refuge now as it is somewhere to get drunk?
It’s been a long time since I went out on Canal St., so I went to check it out. I know landlords and pub owners and spent many days in one of the pubs, talking to the staff, hanging around during drag brunch, and picking up the simple stuff, like how busy they all are. It’s constant work. What I found was this community where many trans bar staff find their place, and what a refuge it can be. The other reason I loved writing this was the chance to say other things that aren’t being said anywhere.
How has the street changed during the time you’ve been dramatising the goings on there? Have you become a sort of Tony Warren of Canal St?
Oh, but I love that. In Queer as Folk, Nathan Maloney was an outlier. He was like a blazing comet. He was so rare. It’s so much more complicated now. Of course, closeted people still exist, but you need to show that the world has changed since back then. But coming out is still coming out. People still have fears. You would have thought that by now, it would be so much better. But it isn’t. Some things are, and yet the pull backwards is astonishing.
Q: There is a powerful speech from Melba (the brilliant Paul Rhys) in episode one that many people will resonate with. Do you feel that speech and the show in general talk to where we are in the culture wars?
The actual event of this, the public nature of this, is where we are heading. We are living in a Britain where some people, some politicians even, will happily talk about the burning down of hotels with migrants in them. When a woman is imprisoned for encouraging that act, she becomes a folk hero. So, all steps are on this road. This is not a fantasy. You can see the steps we are taking to get there. We are on a road towards terror.
Q: How do you anticipate the drama being received, and who would you most like to see it?
I have no idea, and I shouldn’t have any idea. I just hope people listen while they watch. If you are ever aware of the writer, you might assume you know what my position is on certain things, and I’ve tried to undermine that to be fairer to things I don’t necessarily agree with. But I think it will, if anything, send a message from scene one to everyone to calm down. If I can be a voice in the wilderness, saying just listen to each other, stop shouting and typing at each other, then the crucial events in the drama might have some effect. I like to think that it’s posing questions without answering them. I want the young, the old and everyone in between to watch it, of course I do, because we’re all in there somewhere.
Tip Toe is now showing on Channel 4.
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