Alan Cumming Owns Canal Street In “Tip Toe”, Russell T Davies’ Most Savage Drama Yet
Tip Toe is Russell T Davies’ new five-part Channel 4 drama, set on Manchester’s Canal Street, with Alan Cumming as a gay bar owner living with HIV and David Morrissey as the neighbour whose prejudice turns dangerous. It aired from 31 May to 9 June 2026, and all five episodes are streaming now.
So what is Tip Toe about?
Cumming plays Leo Struthers, who runs a bar in the gay village and hires his long-standing neighbour, a struggling electrician named Clive Goss, to do a few odd jobs. Leo even hands him a spare key. Clive’s homophobic and transphobic views slowly surface, and what begins as an awkward friendship curdles into something far worse. Davies sets the whole thing against the real backlash against queer rights playing out right now.
A familiar team behind the camera
If the look and feel ring a bell, there’s a reason. Director Peter Hoar also made It’s a Sin, and Davies has described Tip Toe as that show’s “natural legacy”. This is the writer who gave us Queer as Folk and rebooted Doctor Who, so he knows Canal Street better than almost anyone.
A different kind of HIV story
Here’s the quietly radical part. Where It’s a Sin‘s Ritchie died of an AIDS-related illness, Leo simply lives with HIV. The series sits in an age of effective treatment, and that small shift matters. We rarely get a gay character who just gets on with life, the virus managed rather than a death sentence.
Why Davies made it
Don’t expect comfort. Davies recently told i Paper he feels like “an idiot” for spending years campaigning for gay visibility, only to watch homophobia and transphobia surge. “Our visibility is being weaponised,” he said. That anger runs through every episode.
