Spoilers for Tip Toe episode 5 ahead — contains distressing themes.
If you want to feel terrible about the world around you and simultaneously as though you’ve been hit with a sledgehammer, binge episodes 1-5 of Tip Toe in the same day (all of which are now streaming on Channel 4).
Since last week, we’ve been following a rapidly unraveling feud between 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.
While creator Russell T Davies teased what was to come in each episode’s cold open, we finally learned the full horror behind Leo’s fate in episode 5. After turning up at Clive’s unannounced during a large football gathering, Clive orchestrates Leo’s public death to “make an example” of not tolerating “his sort” on their street.
I cannot overstate just how difficult and upsetting it is to watch, but Davies perfectly encapsulates the growing social divides in the UK, and how many contrasting opinions are feeding into it.
Davies has already spoken of the timely series acting as a “wake-up call,” but what did it take to make arguably the most important episode of TV in the 21st century into a reality?
‘There are so many points that people could have stopped this from happening’
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“For so long, it had been a two or three-hander, so to suddenly have all those boys arrive… it was brilliantly orchestrated and directed by Peter [Hoar],” Morrissey tells me. “They are a group of lads together, but they’re also individuals, and they all brought this individuality to them as well.
“The other technical side is the stuff on the street, which is effectively the end. We filmed that way before the stuff inside the house, so everyone had to go away for ages and then come back to do the other stuff, work themselves up to that point.”
Initially, Leo’s presence in Clive’s home doesn’t cause too much of a stir. But when it’s revealed that Clive’s son George (Jackson Connor) had secretly been to Leo’s bar the night before, tensions start to rise.
“God, they brought their A-game on the day,” Cumming continues. “It was committed. It was very difficult from a technical point of view. Of course, what happens to Leo, but also keeping that energy, and also keeping yourself open to surprise.
“We had a week of laughter in a ‘gap week’ afterwards, which was much needed and welcomed. A week off is a very expensive thing, but you’ve done so much that’s hanging there. When we came back to the studio we’d shot all the outside bits first, so we’d done the most horrible part and now we’re going to be inside… back to the beginning of the story.”
He continues, “I went back to New York for that week and it was just sort of such a silly experience to be away from what I was playing in my other life. It was surreal actually.”
“Where we shot outside, we had to fence off the streets with huge hoardings because the drivers going past could have seen that happening in the street and they could have been distracted,” Morrissey adds.
“There were kids at a nearby school that would leave, and the residents association and council said they couldn’t see anything, which is quite right. So it was a heavily, heavily policed thing.”
The irony of the street closure is how little Clive and his group would have cared if a child or passer-by had actually seen their actions. Kids as young as 16 (including George himself) make up the group that eventually kills Leo, with only a handful being sent to prison.
But with episode 5 rightly causing such a guttural reaction, why did Davies choose to tease what was coming at the beginning of each episode?
“All the way along you’ve got to a point where these people can stop the event,” Davies explains. “They could actually go, ‘You know what? Let’s not.’
“But they don’t. I think to that effect, it’s asking the question of when to speak up when you already knew what was coming.”
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