Alan Cumming Sheds His ‘Traitors’ Kilt for ‘Tip Toe’, a Searing Parable of Homophobic Backlash: TV Review

The words “you lot” come up quite often in “Tip Toe,” the five-episode limited series coming to Starz after an initial run on Channel 4 in the U.K. earlier this year. Most often, they’re directed at queer and trans people, and not in a friendly way: “It’s always sex with you lot,” Manchester electrician Clive (David Morrissey) snarls at his next-door neighbor Leo (Alan Cumming), the owner of a gay bar on the city’s famous Canal Street. “Tip Toe” traces the mounting tensions between the two men in a country gripped by the twin forces of post-Brexit malaise and resurgent xenophobia, and doesn’t hide where it’s going: The very first scene is a flash-forward to Leo’s lifeless corpse, dangling from a lamppost as Clive glares into the distance.

“Tip Toe” marks a return to the historic stomping grounds of writer and creator Russell T Davies, who grew up in Wales but has set many of his signature series in the gay mecca of northern England. First came “Queer as Folk,” a defiantly explicit ensemble from the turn of the millennium; then “Cucumber,” which followed gay men of a similar age into midlife crisis. “Tip Toe” widens its lens from personal breakdowns to political ones.

Davies, who looked backward to a previous time of existential peril for his community with the 2021 AIDS drama “It’s a Sin,” clearly feels compelled to address the current one. To the extent that Leo and Clive are figureheads for their respective tribes — Clive, too, gets a “you lot” thrown at him by a Remain voter furious he can’t retire to France — the blatant symbolism is an apt vessel for Davies’ fear, rage and anguish at our current moment. (As an American, it’s dispiriting if important to be reminded of our nation’s far-reaching impact when Trump’s reelection is cited as both symptom and contributing cause of this backward lurch.) These are blunt-force emotions, and “Tip Toe” hits viewers with them in a way that’s sure to leave a mark.

“We fought to be seen,” Leo tells his best friend Stephanie (Elizabeth Barrington) of civil rights struggles he lived through as an HIV-positive man pushing 60. “But what if we got it wrong? What if they see us and they still don’t like us?” The title of the series comes from retired drag queen Melba (Paul Rhys), the bar’s most loyal and most pessimistic customer, who advises caution in the face of rising cultural backlash: “Now I tiptoe, just in case.” Melba even speculates that 2010s-era acceptance only lulled his community into a false sense of security and lured them out into the open, where they’re even more vulnerable than before.

But going back in the closet isn’t an option for Leo’s employees, a ragtag crew of young bartenders like trans woman Zee (Iz Hesketh), whose GP just cut off her access to estrogen amid the country’s increasingly strict gender orthodoxy. (Even the otherwise liberal Stephanie is firmly in the J.K. Rowling school of essentialism, scoffing at the very idea of self-identification.) And there will always be gay kids coming to terms with their nascent sexuality — like Clive’s 16-year-old son George (Jackson Connor), whose interactions with Leo draw his father’s suspicion and ire. After all, Clive’s algorithm says that gays are all groomers.

“Tip Toe” is, in part, a call for empathy amid such dehumanizing rhetoric, and thus introduces some individual quirks amid the allegory. Cumming dials back the camp of his hosting persona on “The Traitors,” showing both the pain of Leo’s recent divorce and how he hides it behind theatrical bravado. Morrissey makes Clive all the more terrifying for his specificity. Trapped in an unhappy marriage to fast food worker Marie (Pooky Quesnel), Clive blames immigrants for his inability to find work when he’s really just unpleasant to be around. There’s also plenty of the playful humor that marks the Davies style just as much as queer themes. In a bravura montage to close out the premiere, director Peter Hoar stitches together George and Leo masturbating in their respective rooms, Clive doomscrolling on the couch — and Marie getting off to graphic “Slow Horses” fanfiction, centered on an intimate encounter between River Cartwright and Jackson Lamb.

To put Leo and Clive on a collision course, “Tip Toe” relies on some unrealistic risk-taking on Leo’s part and other signs of deterministic plotting. Leo keeps ignoring opportunities to disengage; Z takes an outsized interest in George’s well-being. The urgency of Davies’ warning is nonetheless acutely felt. In the 2019 series “Years and Years,” the writer used speculative fiction to heighten and distill the surreal feeling of our present. “Tip Toe” feels no need to imagine a dystopia that’s already at our doorstep. When the walls feel like they’re closing in, can you blame anyone for screaming at the top of their lungs?

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