Russell T Davies has turned the rise in homophobia into a new five-episode Channel 4 drama, Tip Toe, set in Manchester’s Canal Street district and built around a feud between two neighbours. The series brings gay bar manager Leo, played by Alan Cumming, into conflict with reserved neighbour Clive, played by David Morrissey, after a small act of neighbourly help goes wrong.
That premise lands at a time when Davies says the atmosphere around LGBTQ+ people has worsened again. He says he has never written so furiously in his life, and links the drama to what he describes as a slide back into something as bad as he can remember, if not worse, with anger and violence growing even as inclusion and representation have become more visible. For viewers searching for Tip Toe Channel 4, the draw is not just the cast or the setting, but the way the show folds a very current fear into a neighbourhood dispute.
The story begins when Leo asks Clive for help after getting locked out of his house. From there, Davies uses the two men’s clash to probe how hostility can start in ordinary places and turn sharper in public. The Canal Street setting matters because it sits in the heart of Manchester’s queer scene, and Davies is revisiting ground he helped define with Queer As Folk, the 1999 series that regularly featured scenes shot there and followed the lives of three gay men.
Davies says the threat is not confined to one community, but he is clear about who gets singled out. He says the abuse aimed at him online, where he is called a groomer and a paedophile for supporting trans rights, is shocking, and says LGBTQ+ people are an easy focus for that kind of anger. Tip Toe places that uglier reality inside a drama about neighbours, which gives the series its force: the prejudice is not abstract, and it is not stuck in the past.
Melba’s line in the first episode gives that idea a plain, human shape. He says, “I used to walk into a room and go: ‘Ta-da!’” and then, “Now I tip toe. Just in case.” That shift from confidence to caution is what Davies is trying to capture in five episodes, and it is the reason the series feels like more than another television drama. Whether audiences embrace that bluntness or recoil from it is the unanswered question, but Tip Toe is already making its point before the first episode ends: for some people, the need to shrink themselves is back in the room.
