Over the past week or so, an increasing number of my queer friends started texting me about a show called Tip Toe and asking if I’d seen it. Alternatively, they described it as “bleak”, “urgent”, and “necessary viewing for your uncle that voted Reform”. So, once the queer council had spoken: I had no option but to tune in.
From Russell T Davies, the creator of It’s A Sin, Tip Toe is a Channel 4 drama exploring our current cultural moment: the simmering tensions between queer and straight communities in the UK of 2026.
A warning: this is not a family show. Within the initial few seconds of the first episode, we get a chilling preview of what’s about to unfold. We hear it first, a blood-curdling scream, before the camera zooms into a street of red brick, terraced houses. The cause of the furore is revealed to us slowly, with a sense of sickening dread. A man’s feet dangling in mid-air; his limp body swinging; his neck ensnared by a noose, looped around the top of a lamppost. We’re forced to witness the fact that Leo (Alan Cumming) hasn’t just been murdered, but lynched, quite literally on his doorstep.
We then cut to ten days prior, as the Channel 4 drama unpacks the worsening tensions between Leo, the manager of gay bar Spit & Polish, and his neighbour Clive (David Morrissey).
Alongside tender moments and flashes of joy in the Spit & Polish and the claustrophobia of escalating neighbourhood tensions, we’re shown how Clive has fallen into the slipstream of online extremism as an outlet for the quotidian tragedies and dissatisfaction of his life. He’s not a pantomime villain, but a real man with a family and kids, someone who really might exist on your own street, or who you might sit next to on the bus.
But, of course, it’s not really about these individual characters at all. It’s a story which lays bare a maelstrom of online misinformation and conservatism and shows us what happens when the mask of British neighbourly civility is displaced, revealing nothing but rage — hot, jagged and, most importantly, white — directed at the nearest target.
Everyone's clicking on...
None of what the show supposes is a surprise to me. I didn’t grow up in a world of rainbows, glitter and Pride flags. Originally from a rural, regional part of the UK, I grew up hearing people openly advocate for queer-bashing and state, in the same breath, that if their child came out as gay they’d be “sleeping in the garage”. This wasn’t singled out to me as a uniquely horrible or irrational thing to say — comments like these were just part of the fabric of the community. I know that queerphobia and hatred are never far from the surface, even if, for a brief moment of time, we pretended that they were a thing of the past.
But what is so key to the show’s success is how it grapples with the specificities of this moment.
This is the ‘post-woke world’, one where the UK culture wars over trans rights have taken up countless column inches and led to a reversal of key aspects of the 2010 Equality Act; essentially dragging us back into a pre-millennium era for trans rights. It’s where MAGA-inflected online rhetoric accusing queer and trans people of being “groomers” has poisoned the British drinking well, leading to a retro homophobia that accuses gay men of not being trustworthy around children. As many trans people have long warned, they were the canary in the coal mine: the success of successive smear campaigns against them have provided a playbook for attacks on LGB rights.
One of the best moments in the show belongs to Melba (Paul Rhys), a regular at the Spit & Polish and part of a generation who, along with Leo, has seen the ebb and flow of queer activism and acceptance. In a speech which has been circulating around social media, shared by members of the community, she reflects on how the future which she was promised in 1996 – one of acceptance, of freedom of expression, and of loud and proud queer and trans freedom – has been stripped away. Instead, she wonders if visibility was a trap, a way to get all of the queer people out of hiding, so they could be attacked more easily. “I used to walk into a room and just go ‘Ta-da!’ Now, I tip-toe,” she says.
Tip Toe gives form to a nebulous, unspoken, anxiety that will be familiar to many trans and queer people in the UK today: a sense that, despite years of campaigning, we feel less safe now than we did a decade ago.
At a time when a growing Reform supporter base applauds politicians’ attempts to “protect British culture” with inflammatory anti-migrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, as well as the censorship of Pride parades and flags, Tip Toe forces us to ask ourselves a difficult question. What if none of the education or representation in the world could stop the hatred and fear that lingers in people’s hearts?
Megan Wallace (they/them) is Cosmopolitan UK’s Former Sex and Relationships Editor covering sexual pleasure, sex toys, LGBTQIA+ identity, dating and romance. They have covered sexuality and relationships for over five years and are the founder of the PULP zine, which publishes essays on culture and sex. In their spare time, they can be found exploring the London kink scene and planning dates on Feeld.
