Tip Toe C4

A TV drama written by Russell T Davies

Tip Toe C4

Russell T Davies is a writer who has written some thrilling and intelligent TV dramas. A Very English Scandal (2018), about the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, was gripping, and It’s A Sin (2021) was hugely moving, and a sobering reminder of the ignorance and prejudice that abounded at the time of the AIDS crisis.

But he has also been accused of ruining other series. My husband, a long term Dr Who fan, became fed up of the number of social ‘issues’ crammed into Dr Who when Davies was tasked with reviving it between 2005 and 2010 and again between 2023 and 2025. Husband is easily pleased, he would rather have had more action and daleks, or more along the lines of Richard Curtis’s Van Gogh episode, which probably made a substantial proportion of viewers cry.

So how was Davies’s incendiary 2026 drama Tip Toe? Well, it was a bit of both in my opinion. A genuinely riveting psychological thriller tackling some important themes but also guilty of shoe-horning a few liberal concerns into the script in a not too subtle way.

It stars two of the UK’s strongest actors, Alan Cumming and David Morrissey. Cumming plays Leo Struthers, a middle-aged gay bar owner in Manchester, who came of age both in the nightmare era of AIDS and in the euphoric years of freedom immediately before and after. Some would say those years of liberation from bigotry are still largely here in democratic countries, but Davies’s script touts the idea that fear and repression have once more cowed many in the LGBTQ community.

Struthers’s bar is a haven for this community. One of his employees and a good friend is a trans-woman called Zee, played with the perfect mix of vulnerability and toughness by Iz Hesketh. Struthers helps young people from the community who have arrived in Manchester in order to come out by giving them a job; he is generous but not a soft touch.

Morrissey is Clive Goss, Struthers’s next door neighbour; their houses are joined urban semis, which means that they can hear something of what goes on in each others’ homes. Goss is an unreconstructed man. He can’t talk about his emotions and he thinks it’s feeble to show weakness. He has been desperate for work in his trade as an electrician. He has two sons, one 17, one in his early 20s, neither of whom much respects him because of his tendency to shout and lay down the law. Consequently, they avoid him. His wife Marie (Pooky Quesnel) too is cool towards him, for reasons you’ll discover.

The first scene of episode one is viscerally shocking: we see Goss transfixed like Trump in Putin’s headlights, staring up at a lamp post, and we hear the sounds of his wife Marie berating him, although the auditory noise is distorted as if through a deep dream. As the camera pans away, we see the horrific sight that both they and others are gawping at - Struthers’s feet, hanging from the lamp post. Not many dramas start with the death of the lead character and it is an appalling image, reminiscent of gays being hanged from cranes in Iran since 1979.

Then we are taken to ten days previously, and the story starts to unroll.

It wouldn’t do to give too much away, but the plot obviously includes virulent homophobia, demonstrating how destructive and dangerous it may still be in these so-called enlightened times. The main fear factor is shown to come from the manosphere - rowdy, arrogant, braggart men who think nothing of objectifying women sexually, but find it unacceptable that two men may choose to have sex.

Here, I have to articulate one of the flaws I perceive in this drama. Around the world, what is the greatest cause of oppression of gays? Grotesque as men like Andrew Tate may be, the last time I felt genuine fear for gays in the West was when the repellant Golden Dawn had a brief hey day in Greece before being ruled illegal and shut down in 2020 (what a shame, Taki.). By far the greater threat to gays - and Jews, and women - is radical Islam, which has for centuries imprisoned and killed gays in non-democratic Islamist countries. And most of the victims of radical Islam are Muslims - gays, women, political dissenters, atheists, agnostics. But it’s not politically expedient to point this out, so the bogeyman here remains the admittedly foul macho idiots who, through stupidity, ignorance, or cover-up of their own gay tendencies, create havoc and pain on a smaller scale, to gays, women, and trans-sexuals.

This is not to underestimate the threat from the white far right in the past, of course. Back in the early ‘80s, my dread was to meet with a pack of vicious skin’eds on the way back from a new wave gig. They seemed to hate gays, black, brown and far Eastern people, Jews, and a whole host of others. The police were not so different.