Alan Cumming is Leo and David Morrissey is Clive, two middle-aged neighbours in a Manchester street. Leo is gay and runs a lively bar in Canal Street that’s become a refuge for waifs and strays – young people rejected because of their sexuality or how they present themselves – having inherited the place from a former partner who left him to marry a woman. Clive is an electrician, unhappily married with two grown, or almost grown, sons. Saul is 25 and George is 16; the latter is gay, though he’s told no one. Leo is outgoing, not to say a busybody: he sees trouble in Clive’s family and he wants to help. But Clive, a brutal and brutalised Brexiter who has swallowed all kinds of conspiracy theories online, is a poor target for Leo’s generosity.
Who could imagine that the father of the yet to come out laddie is a brutal, brutalised, Brexiter? In a Russell T Davies production? Imagine that, eh?
Well. perish the thought that middle-aged gay predators are on the hunt for confused youths.
I go to Manchester occasionally. I walked up Canal Street (on the way to somewhere else, of course!) and saw what appeared to be ‘many such cases’.
Does anybody watch a Davies show expecting anything else but a gay agenda? Haven’t we seen enough?
I recall that the letters in that street name kept disappearing to leave the name “..anal ..treet”
This post is verified accurate.
Is this on the telly? What’s that?
But wait! Isn’t one of them a dalek? I suppose all is revealed in series13…
“White wee-wee!!”
There’s a lovely German word for Davies: backpfeifengesicht. It means a face that calls out for a right good slap. It’s the smugness and sense of moral and intellectual superiority that cheeses me off.
Clearly, a 60 year old man who hangs out with teenagers and encourages them to come to his bar is a saint and not at all creepy. And there’s no possible way a grubby manual working Brexiter could be tolerant of his son’s sexuality.
Lame, snobbish fantasy all round.
Replace cafe with Tardis and you have RTDs entire oeuvre in the 21st Century summed up.
Even the Sarah Jane Adventures had some in it.
I’m guessing the article forgot to mention the character Aziz, who is a closet gay but whose father Muhammed is a Muslim fanatic and wants to throw them off tall buildings?
It would be more gritty urban realistic if Aziz’s father was the closeted gay and Aziz the fanatic into the tall building shtick.
young people rejected because of their sexuality or how they present themselves
You mean un-pierced, undyed, un-tattooed well-dressed white heterosexual normies?
Sorry, I now have chronic bender fatigue. NFI.
Reminds me of the old joke about the 90 year old guy emigrating before it becomes compulsory.
He is an ugly resentful puff.
Some figures: as of 2023, hate crimes on the basis of sexual orientation increased by 112% in England and Wales over the previous five years. There were 18,702 recorded incidents in 2024-25, compared with 15,668 in 2020-21.
I wonder why that might be.
I make that 19%, not 112%. Is my maths homophobic?
Not all gay comic actors turn out to be precious leftist bores. The refreshingly sensible James Dreyfus has proved that time after time – most recently in a Spiked podcast.
Cumming unfortunately is as type-cast in his opinions as he is in 99% of his roles although to his credit he did have sufficient principle to return his OBE on account of its association with the Empire, something the reparation hunter and professional race-baiter Sir Lenworth Henry has pointedly failed to do.
Pendantry – Lenny is a CBE and K (or KB, but not KBE)
Guilty as charged but I will never stop pointing out the hypocrisy of a multi-millionaire who campaigns loudly for reparations from the same Empire as his gong.
He knows the Empire won’t pay it. Its the oiks that will pay it.
It take place in 2026? So complete fantasy then. It’s basically The Handmaid’s Tale but for gays who think they are so oppressed because they are only multimillionaires who destroyed Dr Who.