‘Tip Toe’ Review: Russell T Davies Turns a Neighborly Feud Into a Furious Alarm Bell for a Fractured World
Alan Cumming and David Morrissey star as neighbors in Manchester, a gay bar owner and a hardline electrician, whose uneasy coexistence turns into a violent feud fueled by social media. Russell T Davies’ five-part drama streams weekly on Starz.
Fifteen, twenty years ago, this didn’t happen. Everything’s getting more aggressive, more violent. And it’s going to end badly,» Leo tells his friend Stephanie. Leo owns a gay bar in Manchester, and he has been noticing for a while that the threats, the fights and the flashes of rage keep piling up. What he can’t imagine is that the most brutal kind of homophobia is about to land on him, and soon. Tip Toe opens on something that looks like an ending and works its way backward to reconstruct how we got there. The first image suggests that Leo has been violently murdered, a fact the series fills in and complicates bit by bit, episode by episode. But the show from the creator of Years and Years and It’s a Sin is looking backward to understand how things reached that point, and not only for its characters. It wants to understand how an entire country got there, and maybe the world with it.
Ten days earlier, we see Leo (Alan Cumming, now known worldwide as the host of the reality hit The Traitors) run out of his house in his underwear after a man he spent the night with bolts with his laptop. The front door swings shut behind him, and he has to ask for help from his neighbor, Clive (David Morrissey), a gruff electrician who looks at him with undisguised contempt and irritation. Reluctantly, Clive gets him back inside and, to prevent a repeat, offers to install an alarm system. Leo, who always seems friendly and upbeat, accepts.
Leo runs a bar on Canal Street and laughs the story off with his young staff. His world is about as far from his neighbor’s as it gets, and Davies draws the contrast with total clarity. On one side stands a gay man of nearly 60, progressive, at home in an LGBT+ world with its own habits, customs and codes. On the other is Clive, who is its polar opposite: an electrician, a football guy, about as closed-off as they come, the type who swallows any conspiracy theory he finds online and who, of course, voted for Brexit because, as he puts it, «foreigners take our jobs.» In the show’s logic, these are two opposites living side by side, and everything suggests nothing good can come of the connection.
Tip Toe (the title refers to a phrase the drag queen Melba uses when she talks about her fear of rampant homophobia) keeps finding ways to push this pair of neighbors together and pull them apart. When Leo runs into an electrical problem at the bar, he offers Clive the job to win him over. Clive needs the money and shows up with his older son, Saul. Being surrounded by the kids who work there visibly makes him uncomfortable (less so for Saul, who is far more at ease in any environment, as you’ll see), and you can feel his bottled-up fury at every comment and every outfit. Meanwhile, the alarm installation creates an unexpected complication for Leo. Clive’s teenage son George seizes on the situation and starts spending his days at Leo’s house, and his reasons will be especially uncomfortable for his father.
The situation escalates in several ways, none of them particularly subtle, and Davies handles it to build a mounting desperation as you watch the inevitable confrontation approach. In the midst of the chaos there’s room for homophobia, but also for the economic crisis, the fallout from Brexit, the struggle to keep a business afloat in present-day England and, above all, the situations that spin out of videos, photos, messages and comments online. Social media is what feeds these grievances until any misunderstanding, confusion or scrap of circulating information becomes a lethal weapon that can hit the real world in the worst possible way.
Tip Toe is a desperate wake-up call to a world that keeps cracking and splitting apart, a harrowing portrait of a society ruled by hate speech, fake news, conspiracy theories and the formation of warring tribes. In truth, there is less a clash of equals here than a series of violent, cruel acts against a community like the LGBT+ one, set against the rise of a racist, homophobic and misogynistic far right that is no longer afraid to show its true face.
It’s Leo who wonders whether the growing visibility of the community may not have been a good thing, and whether the push for acceptance went down badly with a certain part of society, one that is still irritated by pronouns, equal rights or whatever else rubs it the wrong way. Davies has no problem calling things by their name («Trump is going to keep winning elections for another thirty years and this is only going to get worse,» someone says), and he makes no attempt at subtlety, whether in the dialogue or in the narrative paths of his characters. His is a wake-up call delivered at full volume, and the series, accordingly, screams.
Yes, it’s true. Tip Toe is built on stereotypes, and its narrative tension is painted with a broad brush (even knowing how volatile everything is, Leo always manages to wade into the worst possible trouble). But it’s also true that people like him, who survived the early years of HIV and years of hiding in basements, are tired of living in fear of everything and everyone, and they feel they have as much right as anyone to live as they please. In context, that may not be the wisest choice, but it’s an understandable one. The series is tragic, brutal, agonizing. It’s also a wake-up call that needs to be heard.
