Russell T Davies: ‘Aggression in the air, there’s a fever brewing and I think its focused on us’

Back to Canal Street! I first filmed in Manchester’s gay quarter way back in 1998, when I made Queer As Folk. We gave the old girl a glow-up. Flooded the cobbles with light. Pimped-out every doorway with fairy lights. We even put burning flambeaux along the water’s edge. “That doesn’t look real!” said the gays. No, but it looks like how it feels, I thought, when it’s the right sort of Saturday night and you’ve got that shimmer and shine a-glinting in your eye in the hope that tonight could be the night.

So it was strange and yet reassuring coming back in 2025 to shoot my new series, Tip Toe, for Channel 4. Rumour said, Canal Street is not what it was. Fashions have come and gone, they said, the crowds have moved on, the place has been invaded by hen parties.

But they were saying that in 1998. The characters in Queer as Folk actually have that conversation on screen. Invasion myths always abound in queer spaces. But as I looked around last autumn, I thought, yes, it’s still the same. Quieter, maybe, as is every High Street, but still with the drag queens cat-calling from the doorways, the old lags sodden with booze and fags, bright-eyed students discovering the highs and horrors for the first time. Yes, the heart and soul is still there.

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I was surprised to find myself back on that street, but it had been demanded of me. By me. I’ve spent the years since Queer As Folk dedicating myself to gay characters – Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal, Russell Tovey as the doomed Daniel in Years and Years, the delicate, brittle kids of the Pink Palace in It’s A Sin – but over the years, something else has been rising up in me. An anger. A fear.

I wrote this speech for Melba in Tip Toe, Episode One. Melba’s a fading old gay activist, played magnificently by Paul Rhys, and he says… “If you’d asked me, in 1996, what 2026 would be like, I’d have said glory days. We’ll have equality, we’ll have love and kisses, we’ll be holding hands and skipping down the street. But they tricked us, didn’t they? They just waited. They let us all come out. So now we’re standing in the open, ready for them to shoot us down.” He takes a sip of whisky. His lipstick smearing the glass. He says, “I used to walk into rooms and go ta-daa! Now I tip toe. Just in case.”

That’s how it feels. More and more, with every passing year. Aggression in the air, not just online, but out on the streets. Insults I’d thought long-gone are coming back. I’ve had a car pull up alongside me and the lads inside shout abuse (I’m 62, in a plain old shacket from Next, I’m hardly flouncing along). I know teachers who’ve quietly edited their presence online, in case pupils and parents come looking for trouble. I know people in workplaces who have discreetly stepped back into the closet. I think there’s a fever brewing, an animus in the air, and I think it’s focused on us.

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At this point, some numb, dumb right-wing commentator will pop up and say “I’m gay, and I have no problem!” Well, there are quislings in every society, and idiots too. But the temperature is rising, especially around trans rights – and yes, I know, this heat is not an exclusively queer problem. Every single conversation seems to be sharper, harder, more jagged, because we’ve become a species that types at each other. We didn’t evolve for this – we find it hard to write more than 10 words in a Christmas card, and God help you if your mum tells you to write a thank-you letter.

But now, we type all day, and I know full well, as someone who’s written for 40 years, our typed thoughts are very different from our actual thoughts. But onwards we go, typing at the world, bristling for an argument. About anything. You wait, I bet there will be protests that I’ve spelt tip toe as two words instead of the correct singular tiptoe. (It’s my title and I like it, okay?) And now our leaders type all day, with such aggression that the President can have a pop at the Pope and we think it’s normal.

But I’m telling you the theme! I mentor a lot of writers and I always berate them if they bang on about the theme. I ask them: what’s the story? Never mind musing about the state of the world, a TV series demands a plot. Fortunately, that’s also been building up inside me for a very long time. It’s based on a key. The most important key of our lives, the front door key. My job takes me away from home a lot (which is strange; I only became a writer so I could stay at home all day). I was always wary of mail building up on the doorstep, advertising an empty house. So, a long time ago, I took action and gave my front door key to my neighbour. A great move! He was kind and helpful and once saved my house from a flood.

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He died last year, the wonderful Mike, and I miss him every day. But friendship aside, it’s the writer’s job to take those essentials – a key, a neighbour, a house – and to think: what could go wrong? What’s the worst thing that could happen with those three things? I realised how vulnerable your house becomes when you lower the defences. Many of us know the violation of being burgled, but when you’ve given up your key voluntarily, suddenly it’s a lot more complex. More porous. Those secure foundations become shifting sands.

I twinned that unease with my greater fears about the world, and found myself writing, for the first time in my career, a thriller. I like to call it a suburban thriller, danger brewing in an ordinary Manchester street. It doesn’t have all those daft props that usually go with the genre, there’s no stolen briefcase, no car chase, no guns, no cops and criminals at all. Instead, we just have two ordinary men, Leo Struthers and Clive Goss, with two of the best actors in the land, Alan Cumming and David Morrissey, playing next-door neighbours who simply don’t like each other.

There’s plenty of drama in neighbours-at-war. But add to that, this weaponised world, where opinions gain clicks to make money, cancellation is ready to pounce, and a tweet can whip up hatred that spills out on to the streets. This is the world of Tip Toe, in which every good deed goes punished. The smallest detail becomes dangerous. A single text has terrible consequences. A voice note goes so wrong. A rumour, a glance, a word out of place, and the trouble begins.

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Leo and Clive have to walk through this minefield. On tip toe. As if their lives depend upon it. And I promise you, one wrong step will be fatal.