Tip Toe creator Russell T Davies: ‘The search for equality has no endgame’

Any new drama from Russell T Davies is big news. He’s one of the great writers of recent decades and his work demands to be watched and seen, listened to and heard. If anyone wants to make the case for TV drama being able to change the world and change lives, as many of us believe, then Davies’s work is probably Exhibit A. 

He announced himself in 1999 with Queer as Folk. This was the first major mainstream primetime drama showing modern gay life. At the turn of the millennium, optimism was high. We’d been told things can only get better, and this show was explicit and exciting, supremely sex-positive, very glad to be gay. 

Two years later, the age of consent was finally equalised. In 2003, Section 28 was finally repealed. And the Civil Partnership Act (2004) began the road towards marriage equality soon afterwards. By then, Davies was embarking on new adventures in space and time writing Doctor Who. 

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But in 2026, the future is not looking bright. The world into which Davies’s new show Tip Toe lands, his first show on Channel 4 since It’s a Sin, is no longer on a progressive trajectory. “If I was giving this interview around Queer as Folk in 1999 and they asked what it would be like in 2026, I’d say, we’ll have equality. We’ll have everything. We’ll be fine,” says the writer, when Big Issue joins him and actors Alan Cumming and David Morrissey in North London. 

“It’s only in the past couple of years I have stopped to consider what the end of that search for equality was. I thought it a palace of perfection. But now I realise, because no society ever stops, there is no endgame.

“I never stopped to dig into our search for equality and visibility and representation and think what would happen if people then still didn’t like us. It never occurred to me.”

Trying to shepherd a conversation between Davies, Cumming and Morrissey is no easy task. They go back a long way. Davies and Cumming first met in 2003 for “a very nice lunch”, while Davies and Morrissey met making the 2008Doctor WhoChristmas special and more recently went to ABBA Voyage together. 

“We jumped around, screamed ourselves hoarse, then thought: ‘Are we cheering our own demise here? In five years they’ll be able to do plays like this,’” recalls Morrissey. “And ABBA were there. Agnetha, who is in her late 70s, was filming herself in her 20s on her phone. I thought the world was going to explode.”

Read more:

• Alan Cumming: ‘My dad was a very good abuser’
• Russell T Davies on Nolly, It’s a Sin and bringing Kate Winslet back for Dark Season reunion
• From Queer as Folk to Doctor Who: How Russell T Davies gave voice to a generation of queer people

Cumming and Morrissey met way back in the 1980s. “I was doing a play at the RSC and my girlfriend at the time fell out with the director and left to work at Bristol Old Vic. I went down to visit her, and Alan was in a play there,” says Morrissey.

“Then, when I moved back to London, we lived on the same street. We’ve been friends ever since,” adds Cumming. 

“But they had never been on screen together until now,” says Davies. “And when they did their first scene together on Canal Street, we gave them a round of applause.” 

“It was quite moving, I have to say,” says Morrissey.  

In Tip Toe, Davies explores a world divided. Through the narrow lens of two neighbours in Manchester – Leo (Cumming), who owns a bar on Canal Street and Clive, the angry electrician next door – Davies shows the wider real-world impact of online conspiracy and conflict, hate and homophobia.

Tip Toe was written with Cumming in mind. 

“We attached a star to it,” Davies says. “You always hear people saying ‘Sigourney Weaver is attached to this film’ – so we said, let’s give that a go.”

“There were so many things I could relate to in Leo as a pretty deep-middle-aged queer man,” says Cumming. “I’m outspoken. I use my platform. And I get a lot of hatred on a daily basis. 

“Russell captures something brilliant with these characters. You can see their point – or at least see how they arrived at their point. Even though this is a huge treatise on where we are right now, it’s not a polemic. It’s very nuanced. Actually, I don’t relate to that. Because I am very polemical.”

It was Cumming who suggested Morrissey to play his neighbour; art imitating life. And Morrissey captures the simmering anger we’ve seen on the streets, and increasingly close to the political mainstream, in recent times.

Clive is being radicalised by his own fury. He has fallen out of step with the world, frustrated at his
marriage and his inability to connect with his sons, and is struggling financially. Clive doesn’t believe in the pandemic. He doesn’t believe in the Aids crisis. He doesn’t even believe in dyslexia. 

“I have to have empathy for him. So I have to look at the reasons why he’s like this,” says Morrissey. “What
I loved about Tip Toe is that there’s a parallel universe where Clive and Leo could be good friends. 

“There’s a great bit where Leo says, you’ll believe all this shit online, why won’t you believe me? And that’s it. The evidence in front of your eyes is right there – someone who’s a good person, who’s different from you but that you know you can do the dance of life with. But Clive decides to believe all this other stuff from people he has never met. They could be anywhere. They could be bots. 

“Any dark thought he has, when he looks for confirmation of it, he can go online and get so much confirmation of it. So then he starts to live in that world. That’s what informs and validates his views, rather than the world that’s right in front of him.”

Tip Toe has as much in common with Years and Years, Davies’s speculative, dystopian vision of near-future political unrest from 2019 as it does Queer as Folk’s depiction of life on and around Canal Street.

From the shocking opening scene, we know exactly where Tip Toe is heading. There is a creeping dread pervading every scene. Violence is brewing. 

“I watched it with [husband] Grant and our niece, and the thing I forgot is the suspense for the audience,” says Cumming. “Because they know how it’s going to end up, but they don’t know when and how.”

Revolutions need to keep happening. Battles so often need to be fought more than once. And freedoms, however hard-won, are not necessarily permanent. This is a serious drama for serious times, even as it is heightened. Tip Toe is unflinching. Unsubtle. Unmissable. 

It digs into our underlying fears about how algorithms are fuelling hatred and division, causing political unrest and platforming prejudice. 

“I am a very optimistic person,” says Cumming. “Someone once called me hysterically buoyant in an argument. But I’ve always felt it’s important to be vigilant. And I think we have dropped the ball. 

“America was a bit later to marriage equality. A lot of organisations I was working with, when it came, it was like, oh, everything’s great. We got it. Then there’s the backlash. I think the backlash we are having now is from that lovely girl [Laverne Cox] on the cover of Time [in 2014], where they called it the ‘trans tipping point’. 

“And there is the backlash to Obama. People being furious that it’s not the way it was in the 1950s any more. So we have to be vigilant, especially as queer people, because nothing is forever. Look at what happened with trans people here last year. You can’t take for granted that you’re even going to have legal proof that you exist. Imagine that.”

“And what can you see that will make things better in 10 or 20 years’ time?” adds Davies. 

“It’s this path we’re on because no one is going to take action that’s needed, which is vast worldwide legal action against the tech companies on a massive scale. 

“I don’t have any children. I was too busy running around, having a laugh, having a career, but my sister did. And now those children are having children. I’m looking at the world my niece’s twins are inheriting with fear – I dread the day those two beautiful boys go online.

“So I’m getting angry about that. I can absolutely say gay rights are being reversed. And our trans friends are living increasingly in a state of absolute terror. It’s being driven by this hatred online, that’s allowing us to be hated all over again. Only now we’re visible. We’re everywhere. And we’re standing, out in the open. It’s like the crosshairs are settling down on us. And it is terrifying.” 

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