New tense and timely ‘state of the nation’ thriller series premieres this weekend

JOE spoke to stars Alan Cumming and David Morrissey and creator Russell T. Davies (Doctor Who, It's a Sin) about the show.

Created by Russell T Davies (Doctor Who, It's a Sin) and directed by Peter Hoar (It's a Sin, The Last of Us), the five-part show stars Alan Cumming (GoldenEye, X-Men 2) and David Morrissey (State of Play, The Walking Dead) as neighbours living in modern-day Manchester.

Cumming's character, Leo, is a single, friendly, outgoing man who runs a bar called the Spit & Polish in the city's gay village.

Morrisey, meanwhile, plays Clive, a troubled and unsmiling father-of-two and electrician whose struggling to find work and whose marriage is on the rocks.

The pair have lived beside each other for 15 years, mostly minding each other's business. This changes, however, after Leo gets locked out of his house and later hands Clive a spare key, on the off-chance the situation happens again.

Taking place over 10 days, the series depicts how this simple act kickstarts a shocking and deadly chain of events.

Watch the trailer for Tip Toe here:

Reviews are currently embargoed for Tip Toe. So, all we'll say is that the show is an extremely tense and twisty social thriller that uses its central neighbourly conflict to explore a vast array of contemporary and quite difficult topics.

Ahead of its release, JOE spoke to the series' stars, Alan Cumming and David Morrissey, and its creator, Russell T. Davies.

We kicked off the conversation by asking the writer where the idea for Tip Toe came from and if he thought first about character or theme.

"I always write character first," he notes, before explaining how the origin of the story came from a real-life experience.

"I actually gave my front door key to a neighbour, many years ago. Just because I'm often away from home, and parcels gather up on the doorstep and then burglars think there's no one in, so they rob you.

"My neighbour's lovely. He's sadly no longer with us, and when his family see this... I haven't told them about this yet," he says, laughing.

"But nonetheless, he would actually walk into my house without permission. I was sitting watching television about 10pm on a Saturday once, and he walked in.

"He was funny. He was a right old trucker. He was a hard Manchester lad, 70 years old, tough as houses, and I was like: 'What are you doing?' He's like: 'Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, I just didn't think.' And then we laughed. We had a chat and a coffee.

"But the writer part of my brain then starts thinking: 'Oh, that's a very good story.'"

David Morrissey and Alan Cumming in Tip Toe

When JOE notes that Tip Toe feels like the worst thing that could happen with that set-up, Davies excitedly adds: "Exactly, the fun I have with that as a thriller, and just that feeling that Leo has that someone's been in his house."

He then jokes: "On Netflix, I would have kept that going for 10 episodes.

"That's where I start… Characters and the story, and then I think if you're writing well, then the themes just sort of buzz around it like flies… I'm very suspicious of theme first."

As for the themes of Tip Toe, however, Davies states in the press notes that the show is his "reaction to the way the world is going".

"It’s not simply politics; it’s everything, everyone, everywhere. Our intolerance, our temper, our shortness, our anger. It’s just rising and rising, undoubtedly because of the way we are communicating, which is in these short bursts of indelible text."

Speaking to JOE about how anger, division and hate online are seeping into the real world, he explains: [Tip Toe] came about because I watch the world and live in the world, and, especially as a gay man, my friends are reporting instances like this, all of us reporting an increase of hostility and tensions.

"I got that. I've certainly begun to have death threats online, which you kind of think is fine… I used to think a death threat was no more deathly and no more threatening than... a huff of air, except I think the world is proving us wrong now. I think we're actually seeing things that are said online going into the real world and being acted out.

"I have a friend who's disabled, who has had someone turn up at her house, a complete stranger at her door, to tell her that she can walk, that she's lying, that she's doing it to gain benefits.

"And he really believed that. Obviously, he really, really believed that standing in her doorway… in a fury as though she'd confess, and say: 'Yes, true.'

"I mean, the loss of intelligence, the loss of dignity, the loss of common sense, the loss of kindness, the loss of manners, there is staggering.

"So seeing stories like that, led of course by our trans friends… I do signings and things sometimes, and I've had a trans couple come up to me and tell me that they're terrified, a British trans couple come up to me and tell me that they are terrified by the society they're living in, and they don't know what to do. They don't have the money to move, and where would they move to? Terror.

"And what do I do? Sit there with platitudes and wishing them luck. So obviously you'll have to write that, that just builds and builds and builds and ends up as this."

Alan Cumming also tells JOE that he joined the project firstly to work with Davies, but that the themes of the show resonated with him.

"We'd sort of been trying to work together for a long time," he notes. "He pitched me the thing, not with the script, just in a Zoom initially. So, my first thing was: 'Oh, Russell T. Davies wants to talk to you about a role and I was like: 'Yes!' I wanted to do it.

"When he was sort of like: 'It's a state of the nation sort of piece about the anger and the hatred and the homophobia and transphobia and things that are going on right now,' all those are themes that I'm very conscious of and sort of try and speak out about.

"So, immediately, I felt... I mean, I feel very aligned with Russell in his ethos and his output in terms of sensibility... so that was a no-brainer.

"But I feel like this is a kind of towering work of where we are right now, and a cri de coeur about a hope that there will be a line in the sand drawn about something.

"Then I got the actual scripts, and it was like: 'Oh, it's even better than I had hoped.'"

We then asked Davies how important it is for shows to talk about the current moment.

To this, he confessed: "Well, I can happily sit and watch a nice cosy murder [show] like anyone… And actually, you can say quite radical stuff in period dramas.

"But I like not doing that. I'll go off and do Doctor Who and swan around in spaceships for a while. But I think my work over the years has been lucky enough to say things about the world.

"I'm very aware that I'm in a very privileged position to get this stuff made, heard and seen. And I think that when you have that amount of luck, you have to act responsibly and write well and work hard and think hard because people would kill to have the opportunities that I have, genuinely."

David Morrissey is well-known for doing a lot of his own research for the characters he takes on, giving them a backstory.

The actor said that this was also the case for Clive, a dark character susceptible to radicalisation by the online content he consumes.

However, he also praised Davies for already including much of the character's history in the scripts themselves.

"Yeah, I did do a backstory. But there's a bit of backstory in Russell's writing in episode three as well. We see a glimpse of him as a young boy in a garage band, and we see he's full of hope, and he's singing the Buzzcocks," he explains.

"I tried to find that guy. I tried to find that teenager and what had gone on with him in that in-between time.

"I did do a lot of research. But in this, Russell had done a lot of research. So, the character was very much there.

"I felt the character was someone I was seeing around. I could see this guy. I could see certainly the stuff that was radicalising him, the stuff that's available."

David Morrissey in Tip Toe

In a statement that will prove more shocking once people have seen the show, Morrissey highlights: "Nothing that Clive quotes in the show that he gets from the internet is made up. It's stuff that Russell has found that's real.

"I'm not quoting the writer. I'm quoting what the writer has found on the internet, and that's for everybody to find.

"It's what Clive does with that that's so distressing, I think, and it's all out there."

How to watch Tip Toe

Tip Toe begins on Sunday, 31 May at 9pm on Channel 4, continuing at 9pm on Monday, 1 June. The first two episodes will be available on Channel 4's website on 31 May.

The show continues on Sunday, 7 June at 9pm on the same station, and then on Monday, 8 and Tuesday, 9 June at the same time, with the final three episodes streaming online on 7 June.