The Queerest of Folk by Russell T Davies review – the groundbreaking screenwriter tells it like it is

Television is an intimate art form, once beamed into living rooms, now on devices right in front of our faces. The screenwriter Russell T Davies understands that intimacy. Whether discussing his early days developing lost-to-history soap spin-offs, making a splash with the pioneering gay series Queer As Folk, or reviving Doctor Who to great acclaim, he makes it feel as if you’re at the pub with him, settling in for the night, ready to hear his best stories.

This warm and gossipy autobiography offers a peek behind the curtains of the British TV industry, and as such, it goes light on Davies’s own life story. Instead, he gallops through five decades in the business, using the framework of his TV shows to propel the book forward at great speed. He was born in Swansea in 1963, to a family who loved watching TV. While he was studying English at Oxford, a friend suggested that, as he thought television was so great, he should consider doing it as his job.

That proved to be a lightbulb moment. Davies worked on children’s television, writing for puppets, before cutting his teeth at Granada Studios in Manchester, alongside Sally Wainwright, Paul Abbott and the great, late Kay Mellor. A little later, having created a period drama called The Grand, he found that viewers were turning off. Ladling on the misery with abuse, murder and a hanging obviously wasn’t working. There is another revelation: a friend tells him he is funny, so he should write like that. Afterwards, there is no stopping him.

Humour drives Queer As Folk, one of his defining creations. It is hard to overstate the impact of the Channel 4 show, which came out in 1999. Back then, queer stories were still vanishingly rare and largely miserable. Industry people dismissed the idea, assuming that a story about gay men would be earnest and dull. The arrival of this funny, Technicolor and defiantly explicit series changed all that. In one of many amusing asides, Davies notes that it was going to be called Queer As Fuck, until a publicist pointed out that it would never be discussed by Richard and Judy. “That was a red line for me,” he quips.

His other megahit was Doctor Who. He had written Doctor Who fandom into Queer As Folk, and when he revived the beloved sci-fi series in 2005 it appears to have been the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. His first Doctor was Christopher Eccleston, followed by David Tennant, and he returned after a long gap with Ncuti Gatwa, whose tenure was short-lived. Davies writes about it all with love, so anyone hoping for gossip will be disappointed. Even the collapse of a Disney deal and his second departure from the show are handled with grace.

Early in the book, Davies pre-empts criticism by writing that he is going to call a lot of people “lovely”. He does. He loves Abbott and Mellor. He loves Billie Piper and David Tennant. Producers, directors: many of them, too, are lovely, and he loves them. But neither does he mince words when he feels like it. Gwyneth Paltrow, who said that she would feel “stifled” by the use of intimacy coordinators for sex scenes, gets short shrift. “How remote and numbed and privileged you are,” he writes, scathingly. He recalls a money meeting with Harvey Weinstein, and how unsettling it was to notice the producer’s “baleful power”. He had tense discussions with the producers of A Very English Scandal, who lectured him on how to make high-end television. “But you’ve never made any!” he retorted, adding that “Old Etonians should never take on a Swansea comprehensive boy in a scrap.”

If, at times, Davies’ lightness of touch is tactful to the point of seeming coy, then elsewhere, his bluntness is bracing. His husband Andrew died of brain cancer in 2018, after eight years of illness. He writes about these years with a forceful and moving honesty. When people tell him that Andrew is looking down on him, he writes: “I always think, I fucking hope not!”

He ends it with a manifesto for the future: a rallying cry for invention and creativity, a call for hope and optimism in the face of ongoing threats to the arts from autocrats, AI and collapsing budgets. He cheers for the likes of Baby Reindeer and I May Destroy You, while also celebrating The Traitors and The Chase. If Davies has an ethos of television, then it is that there is no high or low. He is thrillingly democratic about it all, whether a straight-to-VHS Vegas-based Coronation Street special or It’s a Sin, his award-winning drama about the Aids epidemic. This is a warm and rousing tribute to British television.