TIP TOE

Channel 4

Having been born to British parents and spent my youth in-part in the UK, in-part in the US, and in-part smack bang in the middle in Bermuda, I am what very annoying people (myself included…) might describe as “transatlantic”. I possess many very British traits - drinking endless cups of tea, apologising for things that are clearly not my fault, swallowing my emotions and stiffening my upper lip (pre-divorce…), alcoholism - but these exist alongside rather non-British ones, not least my accent (Henry Higgins himself would struggle to pin down my provenance), my preference for streaky bacon over thick cut, my oversharing of personal stories and public hanging of dirty laundry (post-divorce…), my indifference to DR WHO.

There, I said it. Deport me now, if you will. I don’t particularly like DR WHO. Maybe I thought it was alright when I was a child and we had nothing else to watch, but the noughties revival from Russell T. Davies did nothing for me, leaving me kinda cold, muffin entirely unbuttered. And I know for a fact QUEER AS FOLK was a landmark, important and highly esteemed show (same for YEARS AND YEARS, IT’S A SIN, NOLLY), but I know it in much the same way I know other facts… like the gestation period for a blue whale (12 months) or the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) or England’s chance of winning the World Cup (none), i.e. facts the veracity of which I do not question, but which have very little impact on me or relevance to my day to day life

And so I turned to Russell T. Davies’ latest offering, Channel 4’s TIP TOE, yesterday morning with lukewarm levels of interest, expectations masterfully managed, and I did not move for five hours, glued to the screen. Leo (Alan Cummings, truly wonderful… not good enough to erase the cringing calamity that was his BAFTA hosting earlier this year, but still… credit where credit is due) owns a bar on Canal Street (Manchester’s gay village) and lives next door to electrician Clive (David Morrissey, who is stupendously brilliant in this… and terrifying… and he lives in my ‘hood and now I’ll have to cross My Street to avoid bumping into him…) and his miserable wife and his sons on Good Ol’ Fashioned British Values Street. When we meet Leo he is dead, hanging from a lamppost on Good Ol’ Fashioned British Values Street having been strung up with Clive’s electrical cables, and we will spend the previous ten days with him and with Clive in order to understand (so far as we possibly can) how he has ended up there.

I think TIP TOE is about two things, (i) progress and (ii) status. With regard to the former, there are many very on-the-nose, exposition heavy discussions (which is Russell T. Davies’ calling card, I think, and can eject one from the drama and break the suspension of disbelief, my big criticism of his writing…) about whether life is really much better or safer for the LGBTQIA+ community now than it was thirty years ago. Melba (excellent Paul Rhys) is our Cassandra, desperately trying to force Leo to confront the unpalatable truth of ongoing, dangerous, escalating homophobia. “Do I think it’s coming back?” Melba demands of Leo, exasperated by his blind optimism. “It’s here, you idiot. It’s a storm, a tsunami… and we’re in the middle of it. If you’d have asked me in 1996 what we’d see in 2026, I’d have said Glory Days! We’ll have equality. We’ll be holding hands and skipping down the streets. But they tricked us, didn’t they? They let us all come out and now we’re standing out in the open, waiting for them to shoot us down.” [An aside, but is there something familiar about Melba? Here’s an image of Melba and a picture of me at dinner last night…

😳

Moving swiftly on….]

The “they” to which Melba refers is Clive, of course (and not because he’s a “they” in the non-binary way…). Clive is the straight, white, older, working class man whose status is declining and whose anger simmers right below the surface, looking for a release and someone to blame for his circumstances.

The distance between Canal Street and Good Ol’ Fashioned British Values Street (soon to be renamed Toxic Masculinity Road) may be only a few miles and Leo optimistically thinks he can commute between them, but TIP TOE reminds us they are worlds apart. Every action has a reaction, and for every trans employee in Leo’s bar on Canal Street, there is a homophobic chant on Good Ol’ Fashioned British Values Street as the boys watch the footie, and it is only time before the two collide and implode.

The fight for equality is far from over, we are reminded by Russell T. Davies, and those who are threatened by it will not lay down their arms without something of a fight. The question for us all (for the LGBTQIA+ community, but also for all other groups who have been disempowered, exploited and maligned by millennia of oppression) is whether we go into it with guns blazing… or if we tip toe.

Guns blazing, eh? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️