The wall between two adjoining apartments serves as the separating border between one family and a single gay man in Manchester in Russell T. Davies’ alarmingly essential drama, Tip Toe. This property line is literal when it comes to keeping these people apart but it transforms from a symbolic and then a literal battle line as two men’s aggravations take darker and darker turns. Pleasantries are traded between neighbors of every community every day, but the age-old questions stands: how much do we want to know about our neighbors? With a resume packed with highly-regarded work on television, Davies is one of the most prolific British voices of not just his generation but of all time. Tip Toe, though, might be one of his most immediate, urgent, and pressing dramas of his career.
A brief prologue swoops into the streets of Manchester as we hear the strained cries of a woman screaming. As we creep closer and closer, we see a man standing in the street with his eyes turned down and young men overhearing the commotion from inside. Outside of this flat, the camera swoops up to the ghastly sight of a man hanging from a lamppost, his body still and the air around his body quiet and uneasy. It almost feels like the fifteen or twenty feet in the air is already a different altitude. We then zoom back ten days with the eerie promise of discovering how we arrived at this scene as each episode’s opening brings us closer to the truth.
Alan Cumming’s Leo Struthers locks himself out of his flat wearing no pants when we first meet him–talk about an impression. He tells his next door neighbor, David Morrissey’s Clive, that the door latched behind him when he was taking something out to the bin, but a nosy neighbor quickly rats him out that a hook up ran out after snatching his laptop. Leo and Clive, we soon learn, have shared this wall for nearly fifteen years, but when Leo asks if he can wait in Clive’s living room for twenty minutes until his friend, Stephanie, can swing by with a spare key, Clive declines help. It’s an awkward morning that would benefit from some laughter, but Clive doesn’t budge, especially since his two sons, grown-up Saul and teenage George, are inside. When Leo requests this refuge to shield himself from any more embarrassment, Clive declines. ‘He’s 16,’ he says, even though no one was talking about George in the first place.
Clive wields these microaggressions like his favorite weapon while Leo tends to brush them off in the moment even though we suspect that they might nag at him. Is he trying to keep the peace and not make a big fuss, or are they sinking into his skin? When Leo arrives at work at Spit & Polish, the bar he opened with his former lover on Canal Street, he feels at home as he shepherds his young employees, including Zee, a young trans woman who has to move out of her apartment after threats from her straight, masculine flatmates. There is a key scene in the first episode between Leo and Paul Rhys’ Melba that serves as Davies’ thesis. ‘If you would’ve asked me in 1996 what 2026 would be like, I’d say ‘glory days,’ Melba says. ‘We’ll have equality, we’ll have loving kisses, holding hands, skipping down the street…but they tricked us, didn’t they? Or they just waited or let us all come out so we’re standing out in the open ready for them to shoot us down.’
Some people in the community need their fear and anger to stay on high alert in order to make themselves feel safe as they walk through their daily lives. Is there a price for blending ‘us’ and ‘them’ together if there are people, like Clive, who allow alt-right misinformation skew his empathy to an absolutely scrambled point? Mostly out of work from electrician jobs and battling a crumbling marriage at home with his wife, Marie, Clive never accepts responsibility and points his finger outward. Immigrants are snatching jobs away and the gays are influencing young men to dress like women or explore their gender, Clive proclaims. Because he makes himself a victim, he is the most dangerous type of man–someone who thinks he need to place his feet solidly on the ground again and uses his anger and growing hatred as not just his reasoning but his justifiable defense. Clive continually makes comments that the queer community is all about sex and twists arguments, because his mind is already made up: all gay, queer, and trans people are perverts and they are coming after your children. It’s a terrifying, dangerous, and downright lazy way to validate one’s ill-informed perspective. Morrissey stuns in the role–it feels like he grows larger in stature as his frustrations grow.
What makes Davies’ writing so worthwhile here is how he establishes both viewpoints from these neighbors but there is compromise and understanding woven into the dialogue and arcs of the scenes. Leo and Clive don’t square themselves off entirely in their respective boxing corners throughout the series’ five episodes. It appears that Clive’s exposure to the crowd and Spit & Polish is getting through to him or that Leo can welcome him into his community or circle of friends–there’s balance and nuance before it escalates and crashes into one another again. I don’t think I’ve seen a queer show speak to presciently about the dangerous plights the community is feeling at large. Many viewers will recognize that high-alert feeling as they watch Tip Toe, but you cannot tear your eyes away because it feels so real. Director Peter Hoar gives the tension fluidity like a dangerous dance.
Cumming is a revelation. His Leo is warm and mischievous, flirtatious and cheeky, but we could all learn a lesson from his buried anger that comes sputtering out when he has had enough. After a heated exchange with one character at the end of episode four, his anger comes reeling out of him in a way that he doesn’t know how to let the words out. He’s never had the opportunity to do it before–it’s a strange taste in his mouth. ‘You say thank you to me the same way that I have been thanking you and your kind for six decades,’ he spits before a triumphantly bowing in the street flanked with rainbow flags and signage. Leo is a man who refuses to hide or live his life the only way he knows how. Many of us will recognize our own huddled rage within Leo and many of us will bask in the light that he sheds onto others. This poof, as he affectionately refers to himself, will not stay silent and you will not push him around.
Tip Toe acknowledges those battle lines but then stares you in the face as you cross them. It takes on Trump’s administration, social media, and our personal biases with intelligence and powerful performances.
Tip Toe premieres on Starz on October 2 and drops episodes weekly.
