Tip Toe Review: Nobody Gets a Pass

Warning: this is NOT a spoiler-free Tip Toe review.

Lee only finished watching Tip Toe about an hour before we recording this episode, and he was shook.

And if you're watching this and you're not shaken by it, then it's time for a little self-examination.

Russell T Davies' five-part drama is far from a relaxing bit of television to wind down with. It starts with an extreme act of homophobic violence, then spends the rest of the series showing us how the hell we got there.

We disagreed about the structure. Brett would have preferred it to run in chronological order, to build up to the final, heinous act. Lee thought that the flashbacks served the show's main question. How does a society gets to the point where this can happen?

Despite the disagreements on structure, both of us agree that it is this idea that is central to the plot.

How did we get here?

Lee drew initial comparisons to 2025's Adolescence. Both shows start by showing us the awful thing and then work backwards, asking how society allowed it to happen. But while Adolescence asks how a teenage boy could murder a girl, Tip Toe asks how a people could become so consumed by ignorance and hate that they end up participating in a lynching.

The flashback structure takes some of the mystery out of the story, but Lee thinks that's deliberate. We're not supposed to be sitting there wondering what will happen to Leo. We're watching all the little things pile up. The shorter number of episodes works in favour of that too. There are a number of moments throughout the series that each contribute to the final event. Showing the out of order, and in shorter scenes to fit a five episode limit works to make them seem less significant on their own.

A fight here. A comment there. A conspiracy theory. A misunderstanding. Someone deciding not to take something seriously. A text message. A video posted online.

Individually, they're little things.

Put them all together and suddenly you've got a mob.

But Leo is part of the problem too

Alan Cumming's Leo is a successful, confident gay man who owns a bar on Manchester's Canal Street. He's surrounded by queer people and has spent decades watching things get better. There's a part of show that makes this partly the problem of his character.

Leo has become comfortable.

Melba (Paul Rhys) provides an early monologue about how queer people were encouraged to come out and be visible, only to find themselves increasingly exposed to attack. It is one of the most important moments in the series, distilling down the issue we found with Leo's chracter.

Leo has his safe space. Canal Street is home turf. But the safety and comfort he feels makes him increasingly oblivious to what's happening outside it.

People around him are being abused. There are more fights on Canal Street. His trans employee is dealing with abuse. Yet Leo keeps believing things are basically going to be alright.

There's optimism in that, but there's also denial.

This is the challenge that Tip Toe is putting forward to people in the queer community who feel and benefit from that comfort. It challenges us. You can't simply say, "Things are much better than they used to be," and then stop paying attention. Just because they might be better, that doesn't mean they're good.

Does anybody get a pass?

One thing we both noticed is that almost everyone in Tip Toe makes terrible decisions.

George is a sixteen-year-old kid, so we'll give him some leeway. Teenagers are idiots. That's basically their job.

Everyone else? Not so much.

Leo makes some spectacularly questionable choices, including continuing to message a young person when he really should have just sent him some appropriate support information and ended the conversation.

And when your increasingly strange neighbour has a key to your house, change the bloody locks.

Zee makes some questionable decisions too. Turning up at George's house when he's not out to his dad is particularly spectacular.

Then there's Clive, whose entire worldview becomes increasingly dominated by conspiracy theories and his belief that the people around him are corrupting his family.

But that's what makes Clive interesting.

He's not just a cartoon villain.

He is someone whose anger builds incrementally. The strength of David Morrissey's portrayal is that you can actually watch it move from an eight to an eight-and-a-half to a nine. You can see him collecting things that confirm what he already believes.

And that's much more frightening than simply having a character who is evil from the beginning.

Saul gets a pass

Apparently, in a show where almost everyone is either deeply flawed or eventually involved in a murder, our standard for a good character becomes: the guy who posts on OnlyFans.

Enter Saul.

Clive's older son is basically just getting on with his life. He works with his dad, gets on with the work at Leo's bar with a good attitude and even chats to the staff. He has his OnlyFans account but in 2026 there is no way we're viewing that as a mark against him. When he sees a photo of George, he understands that it needs to come down before his dad sees it.

But he also tells George he looks pretty. He tells his mate to leave George alone. Those are the little things that show acceptance and understanding to his young, confused brother.

Most importantly, he's one of the only people who tries to stop what happens at the end.

So Saul is alright by us.

Tip Toe Ending: the final episode

That last episode is brutal.

The mob mentality builds almost piece by piece, with each escalation attracting more people until Clive says "string him up" and suddenly everyone is along for the ride. Even people who probably wouldn't have done it themselves become part of it, exemplified by the other closeted gay member of the friendship group, pulling on the cord.

The mob aspect of the lynching is left out until the very end. So it is left until last to make one of the show's strongest points: you don't need every person to be a monster. You just need enough people to stop thinking.

And then there are moments afterwards where you can see some of the people involved beginning to realise what they've done. As the effect of the mob mentality that infected them have worn off.

But by then it's too late.

The finally, really chilling part is that Clive still seems capable of justifying it to himself. We actually wanted more of that. We wanted to see him, again stating his rationale that this wasn't murder, it was an execution. It would have driven home the fact that, even after everything, including the regret of those around him and the weight of the impact on his family, right in front of him, Clive could still believe he'd done the right thing.

That would have been a hell of a full stop.

"Why don't you believe me?"

There's one line that really stuck with us.

Leo tells Clive:

"You won't believe me. You will believe shock jocks and YouTube videos and conspiracy theories. I've lived next to you for 14 years. Why don't you believe me?"

That's the whole show. We, both as a podcast pair, and in the broader community, talk a lot about how maybe people who hate queer people would change their minds if they just got to know us.

But Clive does know Leo.

He's lived next door to him for fourteen years. He's heard him through the wall. He's seen him living his life. He asked him for work. He helped him by installing a keylock. He's had fourteen years of actual experience with this person.

And he still chooses the conspiracy theory.

That's the frightening bit.

What about one more episode?

With so much streaming tripe on our screens, whenever we see something that's actual quality, we want more. But...

Neither of us wanted another episode showing the aftermath. We didn't need a courtroom drama. We didn't need to follow Marie and the kids to Scotland. And we definitely didn't need to see Saul's three children.

What we wanted was more time before the final episode.

Russell T Davies'Tip Toe compresses all these little moments into five episodes. There is an argument that spreading it over six might have made the escalation even more powerful.

The pub fight could breathe a little more. The smaller incidents could become slightly less small. Leo's realisation that he's noticing "little things" would carry more weight.

The point of the entire series is that the little things aren't actually that little. Especially when they're all stacked up together. Eventually, they become something enormous.

An extra episode to build on those little things could have made everything a little more impactful. But Lee made an argument that by keeping them little, almost like each of them is a standalone moment, helps to highlight Leo's final flashback in which he mentions that he's noticing little things more and more.

It's a tough balance and in the end we decided five was right. After all, it's hard to argue with Russell T. Davies OBE, the Emmy and BAFTA winning television creator.

So, did we like Tip Toe?

Yes. Very much.

It's heavy. It's uncomfortable. There are characters we wanted to shake. There are decisions that had us sitting there going, "Why the fuck would you do that?"

But it worked.

Alan Cumming is excellent as Leo, and David Morrissey is equally good as Clive. Cumming's range is particularly fun when you've mostly seen him recently being gloriously ridiculous on The Traitors. This is a very different performance.

And Tip Toe gives us something that Russell T Davies has always been particularly good at: queer stories that aren't simply about queer people being queer.

It's about what happens to a community when it stops paying attention.

And perhaps the biggest lesson is the simplest one:

Don't kill your neighbour.

Also, change your locks.

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