“Leo, you’re queer in 2026. You’re a political act”. So says Melba, portrayed by Paul Rhys with fire and pathos in Russell T Davies’ new drama, set around the LGBTQ+ bars in Manchester’s famous Canal Street. He’s addressing friend Leo (Alan Cumming) a proprietor of Spit and Polish club, who can’t understand why he’s just attacked a drag queen during a stand-up routine for being a Tory.
Leo is flighty, promiscuous, prone to embellishments in conversation and a little chaotic. Melba is queer in the truest sense of the word: impassioned, political and articulate. And she’s a conduit of Davies’ understandable worries about a societal lurch to the right in the UK and across the world.
Yes, like Davies’ previous classic series ‘Years and Years’, he’s in more dramatic and enraged territory. We’re talking tension building like Jenga between homophobes and the queer community.
Clive (David Morrissey on blistering form) a labourer who lives next door to Leo, is big, bigoted and laddish. He clashes with Leo over pretty much everything, and as the opening scene shows, it’s not going to end well for Leo. He’s been hanged, right outside the neighbourhood. Was it his rival Clive? His marriage is moribund, his young son a closeted homosexual and his other- in his mid-twenties- a porn webcam model. And he knows who to scapegoat.
Already, we’re invested. There’s such a deep character richness and a sense of gathering storm clouds in Davies’ dramas. You can howl with laughter, be on the brink of tears or be genuinely shocked, all within ten minutes. So it is here. It’s going to be a slow- burning, fascinating and knotty series.
Watch on Channel 4, Sundays, 9 pm.
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