TV Review: Tip Toe
The savage new urban thriller from Russell T Davies is the most devastating TV in a decade.
+++This article contains NO SPOILERS for Tip Toe on Channel 4+++
When is a TV not a TV? When it’s the blackest of black mirrors.
Russell T Davies’ Tip Toe (which started last night on Channel 4), is a reflection of us all and what you see there will leave you in absolute ruins.
Beyond Davies’ trademark wit and deft conjuring of instantly familiar-feeling characters, there’s a deep discomfort, because no one gets out of this unscathed. No angels, no devils, just a tangle of humanity, getting it wrong and seemingly unable to stop what’s coming.
It begins with two households, both alike in dignity, in Manchester, but there’s no ancient grudge here, just two neighbours living side by side for 14 years, nodding hello to each other in the morning and not much more.
Leo (Alan Cumming) is coming up to 60, runs the Spit & Polish bar on Canal Street and is slowly getting over the split with his long-term partner, Curtis (Charlie Condou).
Clive (David Morrissey) is an electrician, a family man with two young adult sons, Saul (Joseph Evans) and George (Jackson Conner), and an unhappy wife, Marie (Pooky Quesnel).
One morning, Leo finds himself in his boxers, knocking on Clive’s door because he’s locked himself out after an incident with a laptop and a thieving one-night stand.
But, before that, we meet the assembled company in the middle of a nightmare.
The first episode opens with a woman’s harrowing screams of “monster” as a dozen necks crane upwards from the street to see an abominable vision completely at odds with its pedestrian surroundings.
It is horror and savagery and where this story will end in five hours time. No time traveller is coming to change the course of history. It is going to happen.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Davies so urgent, so full of fire as he is in that opening image, utterly without compromise. How he handles the next five hours of flashback is crucial, the narrative balancing act to end them all.
The knock on the door that morning, Leo in his pants, Clive’s discomfort, one of his sons coming downstairs from the shower, naked save for a towel, one small moment knocking into the next, changing the future for all of them.
Clive’s discomfort, that’s what starts it. An inexorable, slow build of dread from one man’s unease.
Tip Toe is one of those ancient folk songs with a single, low drone note of destiny played on a harmonium, persistent in the background while the melody trips and dances over the top.
Clive insists Leo gives him a spare key for the next time he gets locked out, but doesn’t reciprocate with his own. Leo is uneasy too now, but offers Clive work fixing a dodgy bit of wiring at the bar. It feels like appeasement, a peace offering in a fight that hasn’t started yet.
So Clive enters into Leo’s world, where he’s permanently clenched, but glad of the money. He tuts at the state of the overloaded plug sockets and insists he’ll have to re-do it all, sucking the air through his teeth and starting to feel in control again. God forbid a straight, white man should feel out of control.
At the club, we and Clive meet Leo’s Canal Street family, the young bar staff, two of them trans characters, Zee (Iz Hesketh) and Hanna (Shakeel Kimotho) “How many of you are there?” says Clive, unable to filter when his initial friendliness turns to a choke as he realises they’re not cis girls.
Zee’s male housemates have turned on her and now her home has become a prison of fear. She’s not safe. Some of the Spit & Polish gang drive her over there on a mercy mission to retrieve her stuff. It gets nasty and then there’s the delight of an exultant T Davies set-piece, the A-Team driving away hooting as the danger recedes in the rear view mirror, their mission accomplished.
The skill with which he deploys these moments of warmth and sweet release only make what’s coming worse. And it has to be worse.
When Clive realises he’s talking to a trans girl, he doesn’t threaten her or turn to ice. He just changes. If anything, he seems scared of her. But that atmosphere, that change in weather is what this show highlights again and again. And Morrissey plays it with real control.
They all do. The appeasement, the smiles concealing fear, the nervous looks between bar staff, the walkie talkies they keep to hand like soldiers in battle, one of them always on lookout duty, is constant. Small adjustments in an effort to keep safe. All women will recognise it.
At one end of the bar sits Melba (Paul Rhys) the soothsayer, the Cassandra of Canal Street, part of the furniture, his make-up just so, a quiet, haughty something detectable as he drinks whisky after whisky. He watches from his stool at the edge of the action and he knows what’s coming.
He and Leo talk about the old days. Leo remembers the call from his ex telling him to “get tested” and how he found out about his own HIV status soon after.
“Do you think it’s coming back? All that shit from the 90s?” says Leo, rolling his whisky around the tumbler in his hand. Melba’s eyes bulge. “Do I think it’s coming back? It’s back.”
“I used to walk into a room and go…ta-da! Now I tip-toe, just in case.”
There’s the drone again, rumbling underneath the sound mix like a slowly passing tram. The herd has been spooked and now everyone is on alert, like the call to arms is coming any day, even though some of them thought the war was over. “I marched,” says Leo, exasperated that the fight should have to be won again.
But the fear is back, on social media, between friends and families and households and politicians who can’t agree on what a woman is and who gets to exist and who can live on this floating raft of bigotry and shame we call a country.
The inhumanity of the desensitised mob following Tommy Robinson to Trafalgar Square under St George’s flag and roaring about their country like they’ve done anything to earn it. The headlines about another murdered trans woman, another attack on a religious building.
They’re all here and they’re closing in. They’re not on screen, but in Tip Toe you can hear them, you can feel them with a sickening certainty and you can see them in the eyes of every character you’ve started to care about.
I won’t go through the plot of the remaining episodes or give anything away about where this goes. But it’s stuffed, as you’d expect, with exceptional support from a dazzling cast including Elizabeth Berrington and Denise Welch.
But you need to experience it as it was written and you need to feel the danger approaching, just like they do.
When it comes, the last episode is like nothing I’ve seen on British television. Even with the knowledge of where the road is taking you, the shock is absolute, because part of you won’t believe it’s actually going to happen.
And isn’t that the point? You can be a nice, liberal, middle-class Channel 4 viewer with regular direct debits to charity, but the idea that fascism is actually going mainstream remains in your peripheral vision. It’s just keyboard warriors, just talk. There are enough goodies to cancel out the baddies.
But they’ve always been here, your neighbours who give to charity, love their kids, say they care about “the safety of women and girls”. It’s not them and us, it’s that inconvenient tangle of humanity that we can’t unknot ourselves from.
I love this show most of all for the “no angels, no devils” approach, no convenient monster who always had it in them to do the very worst things and no innocent lambs brought to slaughter in pure white. Everyone is a messy human with their own prejudices.
But the atmospheric conditions (driven by the real villains) and the surge of the mob brings us to where we are now.
Melba had it right. The weather is already overhead. The hate is already soaking into the ground and coming out of the taps. It’s here, marching and voting and emboldened by the change we can all feel in the air.
Whatever your reaction to the ending - and I really commend you to watch it without finding anything out before it airs - it hits hard and dares you to look, like the videos of “real deaths” one of the characters casually watches on his phone when he’s alone.
“I simply think the ending’s true,” Davies said at a launch event for the series last month. And he’s right.
This is an emergency.
The next episode airs tonight and the final three episodes of Tip Toe will be on Channel 4’s streaming serving from 7th June.
Russell is a bona fide nailed on genius. I worked on Canal Street for a decade in the 90's & it was the best time I've ever had. God, I miss my old friends.
An emergency. Yes. We’re in it. And this sounds like it understands…