In the most troubling way, the timing of Tip Toe couldn’t have been more horribly perfect. 

On the day the final gruelling episode aired on Channel 4, in scenes which screamed at the audience ‘look for pity’s sake, equality is dying’, an event took place which until recently would have been considered too far-fetched for TV drama.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch declared war on equality. She vowed to end the legal requirement on public bodies like schools and hospitals to consider the issue of equality when making decisions. To her right, the Reform Party goes further: promising to abolish the Equality Act.

We’re living in times which many - myself included - thought we’d never see again. A time of hate and division, of clocks turning back, of old monsters rising from graves, of a withering of decency and empathy and kindness, of a growing sense that there’s violence in the air: that “something bad is coming”, as Alan Cumming says in Tip Toe.

Tip Toe is a light turned on in a pitch-black room. It reveals what we’ve become: the terrible metamorphosis we’ve gone through as a country.

The idea that our society was steadily becoming more progressive, more equal, more inclusive, has rotted away. Extremism is today’s currency: scapegoating, othering, exclusion, persecution.

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Tip Toe - by Russell T Davies - rises beyond mere TV. It’s state of the nation drama, of the kind not seen for years. 

Alan Cumming and David Morrissey are two neighbours: Cumming, an out and proud gay man, the owner of an LGBT bar; Morrissey, a repressed straight electrician, a man who watches murder videos on Twitter and hates the world almost as much as he hates........

© Herald Scotland