Outside the Blue Box: Tip Toe (2026)

The following article contains spoilers for Tip Toe.

You’re not wrong, I chose an interesting time to write an article about Russell T Davies. The man who, in 2005, brought Doctor Who back to life might have turned out to be, in 2025, the man who killed it off again. At the very least, he’s left a Gordian knot of problems for whoever picks up the baton, and my intent with this article is not to engage in apologetics for that. I was talking to a friend recently about the ending of The Reality War, and I found my voice rising with incredulity all over again, one year on and still unable to get my head around what a disastrous hour of television it was. But just as the BBC were announcing the cancellation of 2026’s Doctor Who Christmas special, Davies was also getting glowing reviews for his Channel Four miniseries Tip Toe. So, assuming we’re emotionally prepared for the answers we may receive, we can perform a useful experiment here: is Doctor Who‘s current doldrums the fault of the showrunner, or the show?

I think it’s worth stating, before we discuss Tip Toe, that I think Doctor Who would be in trouble in 2026 no matter who was in charge. When it returned in 2005, it already existed in defiance of certain television trends: then-BBC One controller Lorraine Heggessey insisted that it return in its traditional Saturday teatime slot because nobody else was putting drama out at that time. This against-the-grain thinking is sadly rare in television, and Davies deserves credit for making the revived show such a hit that it managed, for a good decade, to hold back the tide. Today, the markers of quality in television drama (serialisation, consistency of tone, mind-numbing tedium) have turned decisively away from Doctor Who‘s go-anywhere, do-anything format, and the show’s traditional family audience has splintered into a thousand separate screens. As much as I’d like to believe there are still some Lorraine Heggesseys out there who recognise the public’s unfulfilled yearning for something different, I don’t see much evidence of it. Instead, British television executives appear to be pursuing a dream where only about five people are actually allowed to write TV drama. As Doctor Who fans speculate on which one of those five will run the show next (Jack Thorne? Sally Wainwright? Russell T Davies again?) it must be acknowledged that they’re likely to hit the same headwinds that RTD2 did.

Davies’s decision to aim for a younger audience during his second stint as showrunner angered plenty of fans, but it was a reasonable response to the dissolution of a TV monoculture. It could have worked, too. When Davies is writing for a very specific, targeted audience, he’s often at his best. The dramas he turned out during the late 2010s and early 2020s – A Very British Scandal, Years and Years, It’s a Sin – represent his best work. They show his tendency towards caricature, an occasionally irritating part of his early career, being sharpened to a vicious point. They remind us Davies’s role model for politically engaged art was not Ken Loach or Alan Bleasdale but Charles Dickens, a social critic but also a showman who thrived in a serialised format. Part of the excitement of his 2023 return to Doctor Who was the idea of having that Russell T Davies in charge of Doctor Who. We got grace notes of it, most obviously in the villains. Roger ap Gwillam, Conrad Clark and the influencers of Dot and Bubble could all have showed up in Years and Years without much alteration. But for the most part, the show’s commentary and representation remained on a fairly superficial level. Tip Toe‘s promise is to return to us the angry, politicised Davies.

Tip Toe begins with a shocking image – a lynched man, played by twinkly, charming Alan Cumming, hanging from a lamp-post – then cuts back to a comic scene whose lighter tone is tainted by a caption telling us this is just ten days before that brutal opener. In telling the story of Leo and Clive, two neighbours whose mutual suspicion ends in murder, Davies is aided by perhaps the best cast he’s ever had. Cumming’s extra-textual celebrity as a host of reality shows and disastrous awards ceremonies perversely helps his performance as Leo, a man coming to the realisation that even his considerable charisma is no match for what’s coming. David Morrissey, who is always excellent, gives one of the great television performances of our age as Clive, adding humanity and shading to him without softening or apologising for his violent bigotry. Apart from a distracting third-episode extended cameo from Denise Welch, which never escapes the sense of stunt casting, there’s not a false note in the supporting cast. Particular garlands go to Jackson Connor as Clive’s closeted son, Lily Best as a rambunctious ‘den mother’ to the young clientele of Leo’s gay bar and Paul Rhys as Melba, a misanthropic drag queen who gets several of Davies’s best speeches.

Several of those speeches have gone viral, to general approval but some charges of didacticism. There’s a certain kind of viewer who accuses any film or show where people talk about social issues or conspiracy theories of being “too online”, as if people only discuss such culture-war chum on social media. (If that is your lived experience, I want you to know that I don’t doubt you – I just envy your blessed life) But Davies’s speeches are, fundamentally, character pieces. I’m not saying he disagrees with every single thing Melba says, but by the point in the final episode where Melba is riffing about how the downfall of Britain can be measured by croissants it’s fair to assume that not all of this is meant to be instructional. Davies loves writing these speeches, and actors love delivering them. They usually contain some truth, but they’re also there to entertain. It would be nice if Leo’s speeches on gay rights and the long shadow of the AIDS crisis shifted the views of some Reform voters, but Davies isn’t writing them with that expectation. If he was, he’d have depicted at least one of them changing Clive’s mind.

Indeed, the very achievement of Tip Toe – the fact that it’s tremendously slick, watchable entertainment, one which got even a binge-watch sceptic like me to blast through it in two nights – is also what makes it a slightly pyrrhic victory. In the run-up to his sixtieth anniversary Doctor Who specials, Davies briefly became an unlikely darling of the Telegraph with his comments about woke young writers who were more concerned with representing their class or minority group than a love of the medium. The Tory press’s brief flirtation with him obviously fizzled out as soon as people actually saw The Star Beast, but it does point up the way in which Davies’s greatest strength is often his greatest weakness. He palpably loves television, a love that’s reflected in everything from Bad Wolf‘s camp jabs at reality TV to the entire existence of Nolly. But television has a surfeit of self-love nowadays. Every show seems to be made by people who think the medium has already been perfected, rather than with Lorraine Heggessey’s clear-eyed ability to see what it isn’t currently doing. And there are parts of Tip Toe where you wish Davies would listen to those young writers; they may not understand television as well as he does, but they understand the world a little more.

Episode two of Tip Toe is, in some ways, the best one. It contains a long, dialogue-free text message conversation that is the furthest thing from second-screen-friendly viewing, a welcome reminder that Davies can still buck televisual trends. It’s also the deepest dive into Leo and Clive’s relationship, arguably the only moment where they really feel like they’ve lived next door to each other for the decade or so the show wants you to believe. It allows Clive a little more complexity, showing that for all he isn’t as cosmopolitan or as cultured as Leo there are certain areas of the world where he puts Leo’s knowledge to shame, and giving him a tellingly curtailed moment of joy as he dances to the music in Leo’s bar before realising people are watching him. It’s also one in which Leo goes to a community meeting and meets a woman who tells a bizarre story about her club being pelted with chips by pro-Palestinian lesbians, and where he meets a drag-hating disabled man who tries overtly to goad him into saying something ableist.

In terms of the architecture of the drama, this is a very successful inclusion. It reminds us that the clash between Leo and Clive isn’t a straightforward liberal versus reactionary conflict; in many ways, Leo’s sexuality is the one thing standing in the way of him actually being Clive. And in order to make this point, Davies has used two of the most rightly sensitive issues in modern politics as throwaway gags. Tip Toe is a liberal series, in ways both good and bad; it eagerly keeps up to date with new frontiers in televisual representation, including trans and Black and Asian and gender-nonconforming characters in ways that make Davies’s original succès de scandale Queer as Folk look antique. It is also a show which reminds you that modern British centrism founds its morality and political vision of the world on the question of which people would be good company at dinner parties. I cannot count the number of times I’ve read articles in the supposedly liberal press which paint all Left-wingers as mindless fanatics, but consider it inexplicably important to tell readers that far-right politicians are a jolly good laugh at the Spectator‘s annual garden do. If you want a print example of this, Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s recent New York Review of Books article about Keir Starmer is a classic of the form; if you prefer an on-screen example, Davies’s treatment of the character of Stephanie is hard to beat.

Stephanie, played very well by the reliable Elizabeth Berrington, is a “gender critical feminist”. What that means is that she’ll criticise Leo for “your lot” bringing in the concept of gender self-identification, and even link that to other right-wing beliefs she has about migration, but unlike the similarly prejudiced, paranoid Clive you can down a bottle of plonk and binge-watch a zombie show with her. Davies spoke to the Guardian about how this character was inspired by friends of his, and how “It’s only online you end up screaming and shouting and being attacked by them. In real life, you have a chat, and we all kind of sigh and put up with each other. That’s how the world works.” The Guardian, needless to say, loved that, and noted that Stephanie ends up “on the same side” as the trans character Zee (Iz Hesketh). But they don’t. They’re both in the house when Clive and his friends are pounding on the doors, but that’s it – they don’t support or help each other, and Stephanie never comes to treat Zee with more respect. The last thing we hear Stephanie say to Zee is a snippy remark before the attack about how she’s too hormonal, a piece of transmisogyny which also sounds quite a lot like original-brand misogyny. If the brutal murder of Leo by men who call Zee “it” does anything to make her reflect on her views, we do not see it, nor do we read about it in the puzzlingly protracted “where are they now” end captions.

I find that quote from Davies in the Guardian so strange because Tip Toe is, for the most part, a show about how that’s not how the world works any more. At one particularly tense moment, Leo snaps at Clive “You’ll believe anything online, why don’t you believe me?”, and that, ultimately, is the problem the show is diagnosing. Just as the online world is at its most fake, at its most pregnant with misinformation and disinformation, it seems to have achieved a victory over reality. If Davies was really interested in exploring this, he’d be interested in how Stephanie can apparently turn it off and on, how she can have media-fed opinions about trans people and then hang out in a queer nightclub with drag queens and trans youth. But he doesn’t explore it, because, I think, he knows it’s false. I suspect Davies realises that, the way things are going, he won’t be allowed to make any more fiery pro-trans awards speeches without putting a bit of credit in at the Bank of Bigotry, so he’s created this utterly unbelievable character just to show the rest of the British media that it’s nothing personal. But it exists at the expense of both the show’s argument and its sense of reality. He should have been less concerned with representing his class and more concerned with making good television.

The blind spot Tip Toe has for Stephanie ultimately eats away at its better qualities. I’ve noted above that Clive isn’t a one-dimensional monster by any means, but you do wonder if he’s positioned as the show’s villain just because Davies finds this brand of working-class bigotry less comprehensible than Stephanie’s. Indeed, every time there’s a really reprehensible character in Tip Toe, it’s from a group that exists outside Davies’s current media-class berth, whether that’s the Polish bigots who unfeasibly live with Zee at the start of the show or the unforgettably disturbing villain played by George “not that one” Miller in the show’s final episode. I don’t think Davies entered this project with the intention of villainising working-class people; it would go wildly against his solidly blue-collar vision for Doctor Who, for one thing. And of course there are Clives in real life. I’ve met them, I’ve worked with them, and a couple of summers ago my town was set on fire by them when a former hedge-fund trader lied about a stabbing. It’s just that, when it comes to ascertaining where they come from and why they seem to be in the ascendant, Tip Toe has no answer more convincing than Melba’s one about about the croissants. It shows you Clive ranting about “groomers” and “indoctrination”, but when it comes to address the influential people who spread these talking points… well, it tip-toes.

This will not damage Davies’s reputation as one of British television’s five permitted writers. Hell, if the crash-out of Disney-era Doctor Who can’t do it, a slightly overreaching state-of-the-nation drama won’t make a mark. In the moment, Tip Toe is a hugely effective thriller, directed with fluid verve and pace by Peter Hoar, who’s directed Doctor Who scripts by Davies, Steven Moffat and Pete McTighe as well as Davies’s own It’s a Sin. That show kept coming to mind during Tip Toe, not least during episode one’s masturbation montage, a bleakly funny, socially isolated riposte to It’s a Sin‘s similarly early sex montage. Berthold Brecht famously wrote that there would be singing in the dark times, albeit the songs would be about the dark times. It’s a Sin uses hindsight and nostalgia to dramatise that happening: an unsparing pandemic, a hateful government, yet we still danced and drank and screwed because there was nothing else to do. The fact that Tip Toe, which depicts Leo’s bar as a berth against the outside world, reprises a theme from a show about the darkest crisis LGBTQ+ Britons have faced in Davies’s lifetime is enough to back up his closing argument: we really are headed for something terrible.