Late at night on Manchester’s Canal Street, a gay bar manager and a reserved neighbour escalate a public feud while the street remains open to everyone. Ambulance lights flash as drag queens continue promoting nearby bars, and the background blurs who is connected to the bar and who is simply out for a drink. The drama centers on how political rhetoric, toxic online bullying, and misinformation can add force to neighbourly conflict. The setting echoes Queer As Folk’s Canal Street scenes and its earlier portrayal of tolerance. The story raises a central question about what happens when inclusion and representation are accepted but some people react with anger and violence.
"Late at night on Manchester's Canal Street, the heart of the city's famous queer scene, two neighbours are at war. An escalating feud between gay bar manager Leo (Alan Cumming) and reserved, judgmental neighbour Clive (David Morrissey) shows no sign of abating. Yells from Leo are so loud they echo down the canal. The street is not closed to the public as their altercation plays out, so you can't tell who in the background is an employee at Leo's bar, Spit & Polish, who is a regular, and who is a member of the public out for their midweek pint."
"In the background, an ambulance's lights flash while unflappable drag queens continue to flyer for their neighbouring bars. Russell T Davies's Tip Toe, a new Channel 4 drama, looks at how political rhetoric, toxic online bullying and misinformation can add jet fuel to a feud between neighbours. The location of the series won't be lost on viewers of Queer As Folk. The 1999 classic, which regularly featured scenes shot in Canal Street, followed the lives of three gay men, in a way that not only made being gay seem cool, it also reflected a new era of tolerance."
"Viewers took from it that the future could only be bright. I wanted all sorts of voices in there' Russell T Davies. Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Observer Now? We've got this slide back into something as bad as I can remember, if not worse, because now people know what they're doing, Davies tells me. In the old days when we used to preach about visibility, if someone punched you in the face, or excluded you you had the excuse of saying they were ignorant. They were in the dark and we must be visible."
"And now they've seen us, and now I think that anger and that violence is on the rise. So what the fuck does that say? Davies says he has never written so furiously in his life; the central question running through all five episodes being that if inclusion and representation is now a given, what if other people don't like what they see? The feud starts with Leo asking Cl"
Read at www.theguardian.com
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