When you watch as much TV as I do, it isn’t often that your heart rips out of your chest so violently that you can’t so much as look at a screen for the rest of the week. Yet Russell T Davies is the showrunner who can achieve this time and time again, from jaw-dropping noughties queer drama Queer as Folk to devastating AIDS crisis tragedy It’s a Sin.
Now, Channel 4 adds Tip Toe to Davies’ ever-growing list of gut punches, which can most easily be described as a cross between Queer as Folk and dystopian BBC drama Years and Years. The focus is on a pair of neighbors in Manchester: Leo (Alan Cumming), a vivacious gay bar owner on Canal Street, and Clive (David Morrissey), a conservative electrician with two teenage sons.
“As modern prejudices and radicalized opinions creep into their community, everyday friction spirals into shocking violence,” Channel 4 explains. Not much more can explicitly be said without giving too much away, but Tip Toe episodes 1 and 2 are now available to stream.
If you’ve seen them already, you were hopefully horrified by the show’s shocking cold open, alluding to the brutal ending that takes place just 10 days after our story begins. You were hopefully moved by the monologues drunkenly slurred down Manchester’s famous Canal Street, and you hopefully didn’t forget that, as fun and frivolous as things can seem in a gay club, things can turn on a knife’s edge.
Anybody in the LGBTQIA+ community not only knows the above, but they also realize that Tip Toe could easily be a documentary. We look at clips of Years and Years seven years later and ironically muse over how the TV show predicted our political future, but we can’t afford to be as idle after watching the five episodes of this new show.
Analysis: Tip Toe on Channel 4 isn’t just a stark warning — it’s an urgent call to action
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Let’s unpack what happened in Tip Toe‘s first two episodes (which is just as well, as I can’t even begin to process the next three).
Within the first five minutes, Clive makes reference to the fact that Leo can’t be left in the same room as his teenage son because “he’s under 16,” Leo’s friend Stephanie (Elizabeth Berrington) blames problems in the care system on the LGBTQIA+ community for introducing new ways to self-identify, and Canal Street stalwart Melba (Paul Rhys) muses over whether queer people now have too much freedom — because their visibility makes them more at risk than ever.
The language in Davies’ script is so loaded, and this never lets up across the five episodes. It’s a stark reminder of just how important our use of language actually is, and that throwaway comments actually tell us a great deal about what’s happening in our socio-political subconsciousness.
The lines of ignorance and obliviousness are blurred together into an incredibly painful, yet plausible, reality. Much like Years and Years, Davies has perfectly echoed the growing unrest and divides among the British public, and his vision of an eventual outcome is, putting it mildly, absolutely horrifying.
Once upon a time, I’d have claimed that something like this didn’t truly reflect the UK I know and (sometimes) love, but now I can no longer believe this to be the case. As a lesbian, a woman, and simply a human being, I grow more worried by the day about the general lack of empathy and understanding between people who don’t live exactly alike.
A united kingdom we are not, and I don’t think we want to be, either. What I hope is that Tip Toe holds a mirror up to many who haven’t realized their own complicity in the frightening news stories we see on a daily basis.
If somebody doesn’t like what they see staring back at them, they’re prompted to try and change as quickly as possible. If not… well, as Davies shows us, the consequences will be fatal.
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