Steven Prusakowski
Russell T Davies is best known for taking audiences on adventures across time and space in the TARDIS. With Tip Toe, he takes viewers somewhere far more complex and often scarier, ordinary suburbia. The five-part series, now on Starz follows two Manchester neighbors (Alan Cumming & David Morrissey), a gay bar owner and a conservative electrician whose relationship turns poisonous amid rising bigotry, online radicalization, and layers of secrecy and underlying fears. The very personal series takes head on the growing trans hate plus social media’s power to add fuel to fires, and the hate-filled prejudice that forces people to tiptoe through their own streets.
Davies was clear about what drove him, the sad and disturbing reality for so many people just trying to live their lives. “The world. To be honest, I was in the middle of Doctor Who when I thought of this idea. And once I had thought of this idea, it wouldn’t let me go. It rose and rose and rose like a tide. I’ve actually got a lampost outside my house and once I’d thought of that notion of a hanging,” said Davies. “I’ll tell you why, because not just the world, but my world led me towards this. As you know in Doctor Who and in all the programs I’ve done, I’ve done a lot not only to support trans queer rights but in this modern world trans rights in particular. As a result I am daily called a pedophile and a groomer online daily. This is the world we live in now where that’s completely normal.”
It was important to convey the endless fear that many live in because of their sexuality or gender identity. “If you then follow that thought through and think I’m being called a pedophile online. If you really thought I was a pedophile, you’d come and get me. And it reached the stage where I began to have notions of not being safe in my own house, which I continue to have. I still think that’s true.”
“I say this in the full awareness that I earn a nice wage. I’m white. I’ve got a nice house. I’m perfectly safe. But imagine then how a trans person feels. Imagine how a trans person in council housing without any defenses with a thin front door feels. So it was I thought if I’m feeling that fear, my god that’s terrifying. And because the whole show is about visibility and reacting to that visibility and a violent reaction against visibility. So that simply rose and rose and rose in me until I had to come and write it.”
The urgency felt was to bring the reality of this fear to a bigger audience as many do not even know it exists or help to add to it. Once Davies brought the script to the network, “they commissioned this in seven days. Seven days. They went, ‘Yes, we’ll have this.’ That was like that was amazing. And I did have a little moment in my kitchen where I said to myself, I never get this good again. Mark this moment. But that’s how urgent it is. That’s how necessary it is. And if I want to be I don’t mean to be pretentious, but it had to be done. It had to be said and here it is. I got to make it. I’m very lucky, but I wish the circumstances that compelled me to write this didn’t exist. That’s the strange thing.”
While many know Davies for Doctor Who his advocacy has been a theme of much of his work and is important for him to share, because if not him then who. “As a gay man, I’ve and I’m 63 now, so I’ve spent decades arguing for visibility, representation, and equality. And it never really occurred to me to think what then? What happens then? And as though, and I am literally kicking myself, as though I imagined we’d reach Nirvana, as if we thought we’d reach some perfectly stable society of peace and calm without thinking to myself, actually, nowhere in the world has ever done that. That perfect society doesn’t exist anywhere. And so, it’s with a bit of horror that, you know, having done queer spoken many, many queer dramas after all these years that I have to write something that says this is where we’re heading. But it’s I believe it. I believe it’s true.”
Davies frames the politics inside a suburban thriller, drawing on earlier work to tell a story that is not only a great insight into the lives of others who are often victimized, but also puts the “peaceful” suburban communities under a microscope, better yet an X-ray that lets us see what is behind the closed doors of our neighbors. “I kind of I did a show that was on HBO many years ago called not many years ago, a few years ago, 2018 called Years and Years, which is about where the world is heading. And in many ways, this is a cross between Years and Years and Queer as Folk. It’s about where the queer world is heading. With this, I thought I actually went to Channel 4 saying you can have all my politics and everything I want to say about the world, but actually it’s in the disguise of a suburban thriller.”
Watch my full interview with Russell T Davies for much more about the series that will not only captivate you, but will also hopefully make audiences see, think, and feel where they had not before so hopefully one day people can stop tip toeing through life and instead just life at peace with others.
Tip Toe is now streaming on Starz with new episodes releasing each Friday.
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