Premiering Oct. 2 on Starz, the British miniseries from Queer as Folk creator and Doctor Who reviver Russell T Davies set its stakes as high as the lamppost from which Alan Cumming’s character is seen hanging, dead, just outside his home, in the very first scene. Reminders of this awful outcome open each episode, preceding flashbacks that take us through the escalation of tensions between Cumming’s Leo Struthers and his next-door neighbor, Clive Goss (David Morrissey), over the course of just 10 days. Scripty speechifying and a finale that strains believability notwithstanding, Tip Toe is, in its unabashed melodrama, a harrowing cri de coeur about masculinity in crisis and queer liberation reversed.
Leo and Clive have a few things in common. Both pushing 60, the men have been sharing a wall in outwardly identical Manchester rowhouses for 14 years. They’ve also both, when we meet them, hit rough patches in life.
Clive, an electrician, is having trouble finding enough work to support a family that includes touchy 16-year-old George (Jackson Connor) and 25-year-old Saul (Joseph Evans), who assists his dad on jobs but isn’t exactly earning the kind of money that would enable him to move out. As gossip swirls that he’s cheated on her, Clive’s wife, Marie (Pooky Quesnel), constantly berates him. Meanwhile, Leo’s longtime partner, Curtis (Charlie Condou), has left him for a woman.
Not only is he unmoored in his personal life, overrelying on his indulgent best friend, Stephanie (Elizabeth Berrington); he’s also struggling to manage Spit & Polish, the bar in Manchester’s gay nightlife district that he and Curtis used to run together. Early one morning, Leo chases after an anonymous hookup who has just absconded with his laptop—only to find himself locked out of his house in his underwear. Clive reluctantly lets him in to call Stephanie for a spare key, making clear all the while that Leo’s lifestyle disgusts him and that he’s uncomfortable having his neighbor around his sons, one underage and the other a musclebound Adonis.
The thing is, Clive’s kids are nowhere near as innocent as he thinks. And he’s drawn further out of his comfort zone when Leo, against his better judgment, hires Clive and Saul to fix some wiring at Spit & Polish. The first sign of worlds perilously colliding is when a bar employee recognizes Saul from OnlyFans.
An unsubtle but rhetorically effective montage of Leo and the Gosses, each in separate rooms, indulging in their preferred forms of pornography, reveals both the secrets they’re keeping from each other and the loneliness they share. While Tip Toe spends time with all of these characters, Leo is its protagonist. And he’s an admirably imperfect one, charming and fundamentally kind but also pugnacious, prone to exaggeration, self-centered enough to earn Stephanie’s accusation that he doesn’t really value women. (She, in turn, shows glimpses of the J.K.
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