Frank Cottrell Boyce once made the staggeringly lofty claim that Russell T Davies' contribution to British television drama was "saving it from extinction." This always struck me as an over-the-top assertion given there are plenty of other writers of Davies' generation - most notably Peter Bowker, Paul Abbott and Kay Mellor - who have enjoyed considerable popular and critical success with author-led, issue-based works of their own. Yet Davies seems to have become the face of British drama to such a degree that he enjoys the kind of public profile that was once reserved for heavyweights like Dennis Potter and Alan Bleasdale. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when this happened, but Channel 4 viewers in the late 90s and early 2000s will no doubt recall seeing Davies being respectively interviewed and grilled about his ground-breaking drama serial Queer as Folk on talk shows such as Right to Reply, and some may even remember him turning up on more light-hearted fare like 100 Greatest Moments from TV Hell discussing his early forays in children's programming. For most people, though, the first time he probably made their cultural radar was for reviving Doctor Who back in 2005. This was no mean feat, by any means: given both the sorry reputation the show was unfairly saddled with in the late 80s, and the creative cul-de-sac that was the Americanised 1996 TV movie, the fact that he managed to give it a whole new lease of life (and even, albeit briefly, turn it into a cottage industry with the spin-off series Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures) was nothing short of remarkable. It was around this time he found himself turning up as a guest on popular entertainment shows as varied as BBC Breakfast, Richard & Judy, Blue Peter, and This Morning. By the late 2000s, he was even mentioned by name on the long-running soap opera EastEnders, where one character opined that he'd made Doctor Who "too gay"... Ah, the heady, care-free days of 2008.
One certainly couldn't begrudge Davies his success. His unapologetic, in-your-face depiction of modern gay life in Queer as Folk, set in the hustle and bustle of Manchester's thriving gay scene; his tender yet witty romantic drama Bob and Rose, in which a gay man falls in love with a woman; and his thought-provoking religious fantasy The Second Coming, where Jesus Christ's return to Earth in the form of an unassuming TV repairman ushers in Armageddon, had all granted him well-earned critical recognition as a talented, even visionary writer with a strong, distinctive voice. And as for his initial tenure as Doctor Who showrunner, it was a relief to finally be able to admit in public that you were a fan without people automatically assuming you were a high-functioning autistic who's never been laid. But this new-found celebrity brought something else, too: namely, an air of self-importance that not only strangled his subsequent work but transformed it into a mouthpiece for the worst corners of self-styled 'progressive' liberal groupthink.
Leaving aside Davies' disastrous second stint overseeing the Whoniverse (YouTube's pretty much cornered the market in that line of criticism), if recent dramas like his paranoid dystopian fantasy Years and Years ("TRUMP'S GONNA KILL US ALL!") and retro-state-of-the-nation serial It's a Sin ("AIDS IS BAD, BUT CONSERVATIVES ARE EVEN WORSE!") are a far cry from the multi-layered, gloriously messy and idiosyncratic worldview of his earlier work, peddling simplistic narratives that no doubt reflect the moral compass of his TV overlords, his recent offering Tip Toe occupies a different planet entirely. This is a work that purports to 'show both sides' in its contention that the LGBT community is facing growing hatred and stigma, but ultimately only shows one while dismissing the other with manipulative, sleight-of-hand reasoning; a work where characters raise culture war talking points, but their cartoonish, thumbnail personalities leave us in no doubt which ones we're supposed to sympathise with or reject outright. In short, this is nothing more or less than moral blackmail masquerading as art. In fact, it brings to mind a line from Andrew Davies' wonderful 1989 television play Ball-Trap on the Cote Sauvage, where the main character explains to his children that a visionary is "someone who has a dream and hopes that it's true." The other Davies - the one who gets aliens to declare their pronouns, has LGBT characters complain about people stereotyping them as sex-obsessed while showing them to be slaves to their libido, and who thinks it's movements like MAGA and Reform who are responsible for stirring up perceived animus against the trans community rather than the excesses of the politicised wing of the movement itself - clearly has a dream that he sincerely hopes is true, and that dream is that we all live in his carefully-constructed universe, and strut and fret according to the design laid down by our moral guardians... Including, of course, Davies himself.
Given Davies' position in the pecking order of British television, I doubt very much that he's been compromised in some way by the industry itself. After all, this is a writer who refused to work for the BBC unless they brought Doctor Who back - and even then, only if he was at the helm. That said, he's a useful reference point for understanding the trajectory of modern British television drama, from deregulation and identity crisis in the late 90s to its renaissance in the 2000s after John Birt vacated the Director General's chair at the BBC, and its subsequent losing battles with content-busting streaming services in the late 2010s and beyond. If Dennis Potter and Alan Bleasdale were accused of being indulged back in the late 80s and early 90s for producing sprawling, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink dramas like Blackeyes, Lipstick on Your Collar, The Monocled Mutineer and G.B.H., it was less to do with their celebrity status and more for their ability to craft challenging and impactful television. Lest we forget, this was at a time when creatives were allowed to fail. Davies' early work was born in that world, but came of age at a time when 'bums on seats' was the overriding mantra within the hallowed halls of broadcasting. He didn't save British television drama from extinction, as Boyce haughtily proclaimed: he heralded the extinction of a certain kind of television drama (the thoughtful, multi-faceted variety that seeks to understand rather than explain) and through his celebrity helped replace it with something shamelessly deterministic, elite-approved, patronising and 'consensus'-based - the very antithesis of what great drama should be.
