In an eventful month, Russell T Davies has stepped down as Doctor Who showrunner... and delivered potentially his finest-ever work in the form of Channel 4 miniseries Tip Toe.
By turns funny, gripping and horrific, Tip Toe is a rollercoaster of a television event. It is so acute as a slice of social commentary on how issues such as online hate, social media and transphobia affect us all in 2026 that it deserves this blog's step away from the circus scene into the realm of small screen drama.
Tip Toe stars Alan Cumming (above, right) as Leo, the waspish owner of a bar on Canal Street in the heart of Manchester's gay village, and David Morrissey (above, left) as his homophobic next-door neighbour Clive.
Clive, an electrician, is brimming with barely contained anger. He's out of work, short of money, and his marriage is on the rocks. Unbeknown to Clive (or perhaps he's in denial about it) his 16-year-old son George (Jackson Connor) is gay.
When George reaches out to Leo for help, because he can't turn to his dad, it's only a matter of time before the pressure cooker of anger in Clive's head overflows. And overflow it does.
There are no spoilers in saying the series ends in tragedy. The show begins at the end, with Leo hanging from his neck from a lamppost. We then turn back the clock ten days to see how we got to that point from the seemingly innocuous act of Leo knocking on Clive's door in his pants because he's locked himself out.
Cumming and Morrissey are superb and completely believable in challenging roles, but so is every one of a large supporting cast headed by Iz Hesketh as a transwoman bar staff member Zee and Paul Rhys as morose drag queen barfly Melba, about whom more later.
Davies wrote my favourite book on the craft of writing, The Writer's Tale, in which he discusses the page-by-page writing of his Doctor Who scripts. He is at pains in the book to say it's not meant as a 'how to' guide for new writers, but simply as a look at how he personally writes.
It's amusing, however, to see how Davies breaks many of his own rules in Tip Toe, and does so to glorious effect.
In The Writer's Tale, for example, he mentions that it tends to be new writers that try out all the flashy stylistic tricks, such as telling stories out of order, while mature scribes tend to trust the story enough to tell it in the most straightforward way.
In Tip Toe, Davies repeatedly and deftly jumps around in time in order to show events from different perspectives, and cleverly reveal that things happened in a different way to what we supposed.
In one example, we're led to believe that Clive has been using his spare key to mess around in Leo's house, moving small objects around and so on. We later find out that it is George who has been letting himself in and treating the place as his own while Leo is out.
This leads to a dramatic scene in which Leo and Clive enter the house and find a trouserless George masturbating in front of Leo's TV.
Another of Davies' opinions in The Writer's Tale is that people in real life seldom make long speeches, so they should be avoided in realistic dialogue.
Tip Toe is full of characters making long speeches... and they are so well written and delivered that they crackle with intensity.
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| Melba |
The most powerful is Melba's sermon on the return of an openly displayed homophobia that the complacent Leo feels had died out 15 years ago.
It's something we've all seen in online comments where bigots are using language they wouldn't have dared to a few years ago. Not just about gay and trans people, but women and immigrants. Emboldened by the rhetoric of right wing politicians, they no longer hide their hate.
"The president of the United States has given them permission to attack us," says Melba.
The show's title comes from Melba's fear of online hostility spilling over into real life assault: "I used to walk into a room and go ta-da! Now I tip toe, just in case."
One of Davies' opinions in The Writer's Tale is that you create fully rounded characters by continually "turning" them to show different sides of their nature.
He does that to great effect with the complex characters of Leo and Clive.
Leo is the good guy, but a realistically flawed one. He's vain, lecherous and full of himself. He's also kind to George (if incautiously so) and generous enough to give his unlikable neighbour some work at the bar.
Although Clive is the villain, he sometimes behaves well, albeit with a gritted teeth expression that suggests he is continually conflicted inside.
He installs a key safe for Leo. He does a good job on the wiring at Leo's bar and returns to complete the work even after a violent row with Leo the night before.
That evening, Clive turns up to drink in the bar, but not to cause trouble as Leo suspects.
"If this is my son's world, I want to see it," Clive says. "You told me to learn, so I'm here to learn."
When a student assaults a drag queen in the bar, Clive steps in and lays the troublemaker out. He tenderly cradles the drag queen as she lays trembling on the floor.
It is one of several moments when Clive and Leo come within an inch of becoming friends.
There are electrifying scenes between them when they go from blazing anger to sitting and talking, and a shadow of understanding passes between them.
"In a strange way, we get along well," Leo says at one point.
But just when they seem on the verge of reconciliation, Clive pulls back, unable to let go of his bigotry and anger.
That's how Davies breaks our hearts. He taunts us with the possibility of a happy ending when we already know what the ending will be.
Rightly, Davies makes no excuses for Clive's hostility. The problems that cause his frustration are all shown to be of his own making.
"Why aren't you rich?" Leo asks him at one point. Because Clive has the skill to make good money and live a comfortable life.
Instead, he has rendered himself unemployable through his attitude and bullying behaviour. As a building site boss tells him, nobody wants to work with him.
His marriage problems, meanwhile, were caused by him telling his wife that he slept with another woman.
Instead of seeing himself as the architect of his own problems, however, he blames everyone else, from immigrant electricians to the gay man next door.
The irony is that Leo could have been the one man to help him turn his life around. Instead, Clive kills the man who gave him a helping hand.
If I have one criticism it is that the story lost its footing a bit in the final episode, in the scene immediately before the lynching, when an unruly group of football fans gather in Clive's house to watch a match on TV.
It's a very long scene with a lot of clunky tone shifts, not least because we haven't met most of these characters before. It also seems odd that they are all much younger than Clive. They look more like the friends of his eldest son Saul (Joseph Evans), who is the only one who tries to stop the killing.
I therefore found it hard to believe that they would all so quickly follow Clive's lead into a murderous act.
In my view, it would have been more convincing if Clive's football mates had been aggrieved men his own age and there had been a scene of them talking in a previous episode to show how close they already were to committing such an act of violence.
But that is a small criticism.
Ultimately, the fact that I watched the series on the same night that rioters were setting fire to immigrants' houses in Belfast proved how easily the events in Tip Toe could happen.
Davies has compared Tip Toe to Cathy Come Home, an era-defining drama about homelessness that aired exactly 60 years ago in 1966 and led to a major national conversation, and action, on the subject. Davies, bless his middle T, has never been shy of bigging up his own work.
In this instance, however, he is on the money. Tip Toe is in the Cathy Come Home league.
The one caveat is that Cathy was shown in the prime time Wednesday Play slot. It was watched by a quarter of the population.
Tip Toe is tucked away on Channel 4. A headline in The Independent called it 'A landmark queer drama'. Which it is. But will the tag 'queer drama' be taken as the show being only for a queer audience - and therefore a small audience?
I hope not, because Tip Toe is simply a fantastic drama that deserves to be seen by everybody.
Just as it begins with a flash forward, Tip Toe ends with a flashback.
In the final scene, Leo is talking to his friend Stephanie about a disturbing lurch in the national mood that that I'm sure we've all felt. A lurch from tolerance and progress to intolerance and regression.
In an ominous tone, his final words sum up the show's warning: "I think something big is going to happen."
