The Queerest of Folk by Russell T Davies, and Out Now by Scott Bryan: A queer obsession with TV

The Queerest of Folk

Author: Russell T Davies

ISBN-13: 978-1911754305

Publisher: Bantam

Guideline Price: £25; 272pp

Out Now: A queer journey through modern television

Author: Scott Bryan

ISBN-13: 978-1785128509

Publisher: Blink Publishing

Guideline Price: £18.99; 288pp

“Queer as Folk proves that we need censorship,” Lynda Lee-Potter of the Daily Mail wrote in 1999. “Certainly we shouldn’t be at liberty to watch naked actors having relentless homosexual sex.”

Such fanning of tabloid armpits was vigorous following the broadcast of Russell T Davies’s landmark Channel 4 series. “Any nation which allows this without any voices raised in dissent is lacking in both wisdom and self-respect,” Lee-Potter continued.

The pocket jeremiad appears in one of two useful new books that make the opposing case. Davies’s own The Queerest of Folk, written with the journalist Boyd Hilton, details the author’s emergence as the most influential writer for British television of the century. His triumphant revival of Doctor Who followed Queer as Folk, in 2005. He won gongs for A Very English Scandal in 2018. It’s a Sin powerfully dissected the Aids years in 2021.

In The Queerest of Folk, Davies, a proud Welshman who, the son of teachers, made it to Worcester College, Oxford, quotes Mark Lawson comparing him with a secular saint of the small screen. “There’s only one current TV dramatist who matches [Dennis] Potter’s ability to shock and challenge through explorations of sexuality and religion: Russell T Davies,” Lawson wrote in the Guardian. Davies’ influence on the mainstream has surely been even greater than that of the man behind The Singing Detective.

His unpretentious, chatty book details how television reflected changes in public attitudes to homosexuality from the 1990s through to the 2020s. “This is the story of my life in TV,” it begins. It is more than that. Arriving at a time when many predict the medium’s demise – outmoded by snappy, vertical entertainment on TikTok and Instagram – The Queerest of Folk remains breathlessly (almost embarrassingly) besotted with what Clive James dubbed the crystal bucket.

“I’ve spent my whole life working in television, and I still love how f**king great TV is, night after night,” Davies pants in a swooning final chapter.

Mind you, in comparison with Scott Bryan, author of Out Now: A Queer Journey Through Modern Television, Davies seems positively chilly in his affections. Both books measure out their lives through television series. Davies is writing them. Bryan, a talented critic who has dissected the medium for BuzzFeed, the Guardian and The Times, is watching them.

A significant part of the opening third lists commentary on landmark “gay kisses” in soap opera (some too early for him to remember): Coronation Street, Hollyoaks, EastEnders, Brookside. The Daily Express, Bryan remembers, addressed the gentle smack between Bruno Langley and Adam Rickitt on Corrie beneath the words “NIGHT OF SHAME”. This was as late as 2003, not the Britain of Brief Encounter.

Bryan traces his personal growth through the kaleidoscope of contemporaneous telly. Shows such as Desperate Housewives and Skins help him wake up to his own queerness. But there is also a creeping sense that his enthusiasm (or is the word “obsession”?) might be a tad out of control.

[ Russell T Davies: ‘I keep a kitchen knife by the front door’Opens in new window ]

All this comes to a head in a chapter cleverly titled “Reality”. That word refers to shows such as Big Brother and its successors. It also refers to an everyday existence that seems defined by and filtered through the glowing oblong in the livingroom. “You’re not able to pull in this club because you saw Brian Dowling have a bad time on Hell’s Kitchen?” he frets (in his own italics). “You’re not able to pull because there wasn’t a show about gay people dating when you were in your teens?” The author eventually faces up to autism, which has been manifesting itself through frantic list-making.

Out Now is an unmistakably honest book that is always at home to a decent punchline, but its containment within the author’s tunnel vision is ultimately claustrophobic. That effect is, perhaps, intended. One still yearns for a bit more fresh air.

Russell T Davies, who makes numerous appearances in Out Now, is saddled with a different agenda. He will know that fans of one show in particular will be expecting revelations and explanations. Davies goes into great depth about his lifelong obsession with Doctor Who – the relevant chapter is titled “Dream Job” – and his struggles to get it back before the public. He is droll about the “people in the industry” who objected to a science fiction show winning Baftas. “To hell with the complaints,” he snorts. “We were building an empire.”

That huzzah noted, Davies largely stays away from sniping and score settling. The controversy about Christopher Eccleston leaving the show after one series (the actor later told the Radio Times his relationship with “three immediate superiors ... broke down irreparably”) makes the most ghostly of appearances in a brief reference to “bad press about the way Chris’s departure was handled”.

There is a sense of two different books wrestling for attention. The examination of his career is economic, linear and amusing. “What you need is a man who acts like he’s got a cock. And that’s Aidan Gillen,” Eccleston says when recommending that Irish actor for Queer as Folk.

Elsewhere, Davies movingly addresses the pains and pleasures of being human. His reflections on the death of his husband, Andrew, from a brain tumour has the makings of a fine book in itself. He was given 12 months to live, but ended up living for another eight years. “They were the best eight years of our relationship,” Davies writes.

Inevitably, the comforts of television creep into even those tender sections. Both Bryan and Davies remain optimistic about the medium. Neither has much time for pompous twits who feel themselves above it.

“People who don’t watch television and go out of their way to tell you they don’t watch television are the most boring people you will ever meet,” Bryan writes.

I trust we can all agree on that.