Russell T Davies: 'The World Is Out Of Control In A Way We Won't Even Contemplate'

The Doctor Who and It's A Sin writer says his unflinching new drama Tip Toe is a reflection of a society "at war with ourselves".

Thanks to acclaimed dramas like Cucumber, Years And Years and It’s A Sin, Bafta-winning screenwriter Russell T Davies has been responsible for some of the most heartbreaking scenes in recent TV history.

But even compared to the most jaw-dropping and breath-taking moments of his past works, his latest offering, Tip Toe, stands apart as his most unflinching work to date.

Taking an up-close look at modern life, the hard-hitting drama introduces us to two neighbours – played by Alan Cumming and David Morrissey – who have tolerated living next door to one another for more than a decade.

However, in an ever-divided society and a culture that increasingly pits people against one another, the two men find themselves suddenly at war over their deeply-held beliefs, with ugly consequences as their feud drags them both over a point of no return.

Speaking to HuffPost UK ahead of the show’s release, Russell told us that there were “various incidents” both in his own life, and in those of “every friend I’ve got”, that led to the inception of Tip Toe.

“Things happened both at work and at home – in ways that I’m not going to go into because it’ll only encourage them to happen again, genuinely – that made me think ‘that’s enough’,” he explains.

“If this anger, this violence and these lies are getting close to my life – I’m in a very privileged, lucky and well off position, so for those who are not so well off, then this must be really bad. These times must be getting worse and worse and worse.”

While his friends in the queer community are “feeling more and more pressure, and more and more attacks upon them” in the current climate, Russell notes that these fears are also being felt by other marginalised people.

“I have a friend who is a wheelchair user, and someone turned up at her door, rang the doorbell, and when she opened the door, there was a man saying, ‘you’re lying, you can walk, you’re claiming this on benefits’. To her face!” he recalls.

“And the fear of physical proximity was so terrifying. The anger that I always thought was online is now visibly stepping into the modern world.”

He says these feelings of fear, anxiety and division only continued to “rise up and rise up”, until he “literally felt driven to write” the script that eventually became Tip Toe.

“I had to,” he explains. “There was no way I was not going to write it. If they’d then refused to make it, I still would have felt happy [to have written it], because I would have got it out of my system.”

Tip Toe touches on timeless themes like family relationships, sexuality, gender expression and tolerance, but also hones in closely on more thorny topics relevant to today’s world, from misinformation and online radicalisation to the resurgence of far-right politics, the “manosphere”, transphobia and the dangers and consequences of unregulated social media.

Episode one actually starts at the end of the story, in the aftermath of an act of unspeakable violence and hatred, before rewinding to just days earlier, leaving viewers pondering how the hell things could reach that point (and, as Russell puts it, “how the hell is society reaching this point? Which we are!”).

Unlike some of his other most popular works, for Tip Toe’s writer, the show isn’t so much a cautionary tale as a reflection of Britain in 2026 as he sees it.

“I think it’s here,” he insists. “If this was a drama about a Jew living next door to........

© HuffPost