Tragedy looms like a plummeting meteor from the opening shots of Russell T Davies’s Tip Toe, the camera crawling over prosaic Mancunian suburbia to reveal a man hanging, lifeless, from a lamp post. The victim, we soon learn, is Leo Struthers (Alan Cumming), the owner of an LGBTQ+ bar in Manchester’s gay village. Channel 4’s punchy state-of-the-nation drama depicts the buildup to what we come to understand is a lynching, as it examines the homophobia and bigotry that are, Davies suggests, undergoing a dangerous resurgence in Britain today.
When we first meet Leo alive, he is running out of his house in his pants, chasing vainly after a casual hookup who has made off with his laptop. He ends up locked out of his own home – there’s a metaphor there, you might think – and is forced to seek refuge at his electrician neighbour Clive’s house, pasty legs poking out of pink boxers. Clive, played with rotten, rageful repression by David Morrissey, is an unhappily married man with two children – ripped 25-year-old Saul (Joseph Evans), who makes money masturbating over webcam, and George (Jackson Connor), a closeted 16-year-old. Clive is, naturally, oblivious to these facts.
