what are they watching? is an interview series for my newsletter in which I chat with a creative about television itself. Previous interviews include Hasan Piker, Toheeb Jimoh, Janicza Bravo, Chelsea Peretti, and Jeff Hiller.
Do you remember where you were when you watched It’s a Sin? I mean, probably one of the most impactful queer shows of our time, right? Russell T Davies made that, but he also made the original 1999 Queer as Folk, the 2005 Doctor Who reboot, A Very English Scandal, and one of my personal traumatic favourites, Years and Years. He’s one of the most prolific gay television creators, and instrumental in the way that he has shaped queer representation on television.
His latest is Tip Toe, a harrowing miniseries starring Alan Cumming as a gay bar owner whose feud with a straight neighbour escalates to dangerous heights. It’s a tough watch and not one I’ll forget any time soon. It was a pleasure to get to chat with Davies himself earlier this week over Zoom and talk Tip Toe, Heated Rivalry, and queer television more broadly. We even had a disagreement about the company we keep! Let’s get into it.
I keep calling Tip Toe the Years and Years of queer visibility. It feels both foreboding and hopeful, with a really gutting ending that puts it all into perspective. I’m curious what you hope young queer viewers will take away from the show?
To be on guard, I think. As you say, absolutely there's some hope, but it's a very tough show. It's the toughest thing I've ever written. In the past, I've often been made to put happy endings on things. People think because I'm a gay writer, I’m automatically a funny writer, a camp writer, and things like that. I am a much darker writer than that. For the first time in my entire career, I was allowed to put the ending that is closest to what I think would really happen in real life on screen, and that's tough.
We can take that, as a queer audience across the board. You know, we’ve got our Heated Rivalry now—and I'm not being sarcastic. I love that show. It's full of joy and it's sex positive. My god, it's sex positive. We need a new word. We have Red, White & Royal Blue. We have Vigil, which is a great story about two lesbian detectives, a couple who go around the world solving crimes. We’ve got very strong queer stories in this country. There’s room in that to go further to say, actually, if I may say, things could be a nightmare!
It’s interesting because I’ve had one or two gay people say to me, “Is it that bad?” Really, things are so much better than they were. We can marry now. We can adopt. We are massively represented in the House of Commons. I only discovered the other day we have something like 76 gay MPs. There’s not a single out gay male senator in America, which is astonishing. But nonetheless, it’s the minority of people saying that to me. I'm saddened and yet heartened by the fact that an awful lot of people have said to me, "Yes, I think you're right. I feel this in the air. This is where we're going.” Some people have never felt that tension before, depending how old they are.
This is not specifically a queer issue. It's this online world driving us more and more into madness, and we all know it's happening. We'll go, oh, isn't it terrible? And then we scroll through our phones and read all about it. I was doing some Tip Toe interviews on the day that was the first anniversary of the shooting in Manchester of two Jewish men at the synagogue at Heaton Park. The fact that it was the first anniversary of that and it became something quite normal that we talked about in passing. That yes, that's the shape of the world. Now that should be the most appalling event in history. Society should grind to a halt and say, “What are we doing?” These things are just normal now, and they're happening all over the world. So this is a queer version of something that I think is happening across the board, across society, in a world united by these tech barons.
I think what I loved about Tip Toe is the way that it distills all of that into a very specific scenario, whereas Years and Years was really taking the macro view.
Thank you for mentioning Years and Years because that’s so close to my heart. And it wasn’t a particularly successful show in this country, it didn’t do well. I’m very proud of it. I love that cast. You look back thinking, why didn’t it do well? I think maybe it was trying to be about everything. It was about time passing. That’s a tricky concept to get your head round. It’s not even that complicated, it’s just big and vague. With Tip Toe, how do I fix that problem? What do I do to make it watchable? And the answer was to put it in the shape of a very simple thriller. I was kind of amazed that we don’t get more dramas about next door neighbours at war. I could have written 20 episodes about that. I think maybe that was the key to it: To take that Years and Years impulse, but to give it a plot, to give it a thriller, and to give it a ticking clock, throw a lot of devices at the screen in order to make it work. I think this time we pulled it off. I’m very delighted by its success.
I want to ask about Leo (Alan Cumming) and Stephanie’s (Elizabeth Berrington) friendship. There are a few scenes that suggest she’s transphobic and yet they’re able to maintain a friendship. Is that based on any of your experiences? I don’t know if I can even sit in a conversation with someone transphobic.
I think you’re part of the problem, darling. Because you need to talk to people. It’s like the only reason they brokered peace in Northern Ireland after a century of war was by opposite sides sitting down and talking to each other. I don’t think she’s transphobic, she’s gender critical, and there’s a vital difference to be made there. And actually, if anything, if we watch the show, she then ends up fighting to the death for the life of Zee (Iz Hesketh). She’s literally holding back the attackers who are out to kill the woman who they called “it,” and she’s holding that door. That story comes pretty full circle. If you want to cast out from your company people whose opinions you don’t agree with, then we’re going to end up trapped in these silos, and more violence will happen.
How are you feeling about the future of the Doctor Who franchise at this point?
Oh, excited! I can’t wait to see it. It’s like I said to my boyfriend last night. I said, “Soon, who knows when, we’ll be able to sit down and watch Doctor Who together.” That would be great.
Are there any queer shows that you’ve come across recently that you’ve watched, enjoyed, and would recommend?
If they’re queer, I watch them. It’s genuinely my life. I really properly loved Heated Rivalry. I sent fan mail as a DM to Jacob Tierney to say what a magnificent job he’d done. I was lucky that 26 years ago I wrote Queer as Folk, and that did really well. That was a nice explosion in television history. But to see Heated Rivalry going around the world, to see people complaining that it’s not nominated for an Emmy, that’s really quite something. What a great complaint to have.
I also love Sally Wainwright’s writing, she regularly writes lesbian characters so brilliantly, and characters of all sorts of backgrounds. Riot Women is gorgeous stuff. Listen, if it’s there, I watch it. If it’s soap operas doing a gay strand, I’ll be there watching it, and they’re all doing gay strands these days.
I was wondering if you had watched It Gets Worse!
Oh, I loved that. I went to the premiere and sat in the row behind Leo Reich. As soon as the series dropped, I watched the next three episodes at like 10 o’clock in the morning, which is not the time of day that show is designed for. I adored it. What a Gen Z voice and funny insights that nonetheless spoke to me. I’m 63 years old and I was getting those jokes. I didn’t feel left out of it at all. I was roaring with laughter. His nervousness in front of that man he wants to fuck is like any nervousness written back in the 70s, 80s, 90s. That’s a man and a man being awkward together, and that’s always good. Imagine what he’ll be writing in 10 years’ time. What a voice! What an arrival!
I’ve got to say, well done to Channel Four. That’s where I started with Queer was Folk. The channel who’s dedicated to finding voices that aren’t finding a space anywhere else, it’s meant to be diverse. It’s meant for the other, and yet it’s meant to bring a wide audience in to see these things. It’s done that for Jack Rooke with Big Boys, and now with Leo Reich.
Despite all of these shows, I’m still waiting for another show about a gay guy group of friends in the PrEP era…
I’m working as fast as I can! Give me a day off, will you? Let me have Christmas Day or something. Don’t worry, I’ll try and come up with more. I know what you mean. I think sometimes people think, “Oh, that’s been done.” I think if I turned up at Channel Four saying I got a drama in which four gay men live in a house, they’d kind of go, really, hasn’t that been done? So maybe everyone’s busily moving on. There was Peacock’s Queer as Folk that was very trans, and they were all on PrEP. There is a lovely man called Stephen Dunn who made that and I loved it. So people are trying.
It’s quite a list we’re knocking around now. You’re a little young you weren’t around in the old days when the list was just…Queer as Folk. The fact that we can rattle through a conversation like this and there’d be titles we forgot is not bad. Not bad at all. We went through a whole conversation without mentioning Heartstopper!
Before I let you go, what’s your favourite TV-watching snack?
I don’t really eat food in front of the television. I’m part of an old generation where we just didn’t do that, our mothers would have told us off. I find it odd, but my boyfriend likes to have a cheese board in front of the television.
Wow what a great interview!!! 👏