Tip Toe, the writer’s five-part thriller for Channel 4, premiered May 31 and tells the story of Leo, a gay bar owner on Manchester’s Canal Street, and Clive, his neighbor of 14 years, whose simmering tensions explode into catastrophic violence. The series opens with Leo already hanged from a lamppost outside his home, then jumps back ten days to trace exactly how two ordinary men arrived at that point. Davies described its driving concern simply: “It is about the anger of the online world creeping into the real world.”
The speed of production was itself a political act. Channel 4 commissioned the series within seven days of reading the first episode, and the production ran two edit suites and two mixing suites simultaneously to get the show to air before references to Keir Starmer and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch became politically dated.
Davies told journalists at SXSW London this week that he had grave fears about the direction of LGBTQ+ rights — a sharp contrast to the mood when he wrote Queer as Folk in 1999. “The way the trans argument is being weaponized against the entire LGBTQ+ community is frightening. You can see it happening right in front of us,” he said.
The series stars Alan Cumming and David Morrissey, directed throughout by Peter Hoar and produced by Quay Street Productions for ITV Studios. Remarkably, Cumming and Morrissey have been close friends for 40 years but had never appeared on screen together before this production. Davies deliberately avoids casting Clive as a straightforward villain.
Clive is homophobic, but the series examines what pushed him there — online conspiracy theories, a distrust of institutions, and a self-education conducted entirely through unfiltered internet content. Leo, too, is flawed: he dismisses the growing threat as something that will pass, even as it closes in around him.
Critics have responded with near-unanimous force, calling the show “chilling,” “devastating,” and a “landmark queer drama.” One reviewer described Davies as “a bona fide nailed-on genius,” writing that Tip Toe functions as “an emergency.” A U.S. broadcaster has yet to be announced, though ITV Studios holds international distribution rights.
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Davies framed the cultural moment with a sweeping historical analogy: after the printing press was invented, humanity spent 200 years at war. Social media, he argued, is a comparable rupture — and one we have not yet learned to survive.
