I recently finished watching Channel 4’s Tip Toe finale, and I’m still sitting with it in a way I wasn’t entirely prepared for. Russell T Davies described it as the strongest thing he’s ever written, and said he had to write it “because the world is getting stranger, tougher and darker, and frankly, the fight is on.” Watching that final episode, I understood exactly what he meant, because it didn’t feel like watching a drama, but more like watching a mirror being held up to something I’ve been trying to articulate for months and haven’t quite managed to.

The show follows Leo, a gay man who runs a bar on Canal Street in Manchester, and his neighbour Clive, and over five episodes it traces how prejudice doesn’t just happen… but creeps in gradually, through small moments and wrong turns and the slow radicalisation of someone who, at the start, just seemed like a difficult neighbour (even though the 5 episode arc takes place across ten days, we can assume Clive has been indoctrinated over a longer period from things he says).

Whilst the finale is absolutely horrific, emotionally and visually, it’s the epilogue that does something I found genuinely devastating, as a culmination of some of the accusations laid against Leo: it tells you what becomes of every character, and the final note it lands on is that within 18 months of Leo’s death, a search for his name returns the result “Leo Struthers, convicted paedophile.“

It wasn’t true… but it was allowed to be. His legacy, even in the wake of one of the worst deaths imaginable, falls victim to the same bigotry that killed him.

I watched that and I felt sick, because it isn’t fiction – it’s one of the oldest and most corrosive weapons used against LGBTQ+ people, the accusation of being a predator, a paedophile, a danger to children, and it gets deployed with a casualness that its users are rarely made to account for. I’ve experienced it myself, something I’ve spoken about publicly and to the Irish press, and three years on from leaving Northern Ireland, I’m still dealing with iterations of it. Seeing it depicted so unflinchingly on screen, and seeing how it outlives a person, how it gets to rewrite someone’s story after they’re gone and can no longer defend themselves, was one of the most affecting pieces of television I’ve watched in years. That is the highest possible compliment I can give to Russell and to Alan Cumming, whose portrayal of Leo, warm and funny and stubborn and quietly terrified in equal measure, is something I’ll carry with me for a long time.

Then there’s Clive. David Morrissey’s performance is remarkable precisely because Clive is not a monster, and that’s what makes him so hard to watch. He’s someone you find yourself shouting at, wanting to grab by the shoulders and ask when he last had a single thought that wasn’t fed to him by something he saw online. He’s someone who had choices, who had a person standing right next to him whose humanity was entirely visible, and who chose, again and again, to believe the algorithm over his own eyes. The horror of Clive is that versions of him exist everywhere, in comment sections and around dinner tables and in positions of influence, people who have outsourced their critical thinking to outrage and who have stopped asking whether any of it is actually true.

And whilst I’m applauding the cast, a specific mention for Iz Hesketh, who plays Zee. Someone I’ve crossed paths with, and it was a joy to see them in something this significant, particularly at a time when transgender and non-binary identities are being debated, dismissed and weaponised in the public conversation – the importance of authentic representation, of transgender and non-binary performers playing transgender and non-binary characters, cannot be overstated. The portrayal is quiet, considered, and lands exactly as it should. Go on, Iz.

But the reason I’m writing this isn’t really about the show. It’s about what the show is reflecting back at us, and whether we’re honest enough with ourselves to look at it properly.

Because the world that Tiptoe depicts isn’t a dystopian fantasy or a worst case scenario, but the world that’s been assembling itself around us for a few years now, in increments small enough that it’s easy to dismiss each one individually:

• The social media commentary that grows steadily nastier, and bolder.
• The casual erosion of DEI.
• The reemergence of rhetoric we were told was consigned to history.
• The way ignorance has been handed a platform and, more dangerously, a sense of legitimacy.

None of it feels like a crisis individually, and that’s precisely the point – Leo says it in that final scene, reflecting on whether the LGBTQ+ community’s increased visibility was a mistake: “every tiny little thing that happens… it seems like little things, but there’s a violence behind it.” I’ve been thinking some version of that thought for months without being able to say it that cleanly.

As an LGBTQ+ person, I’m finding the current landscape genuinely frightening in a way that’s difficult to admit without feeling like you’re being dramatic, and part of what Tip Toe does so well is validate that fear without sentimentalising it. It shows you how quickly things can escalate when prejudice is left unchallenged, how the people who enable it are rarely the ones who consider themselves hateful, and how the communities on the receiving end are left to absorb the consequences while the conversation moves on. It’s something that a lot of us are living inside of right now.

So yes, this is an applause for Russell T Davies for writing something this necessary, and for having the nerve to end it the way he did without softening it into something more comfortable. And it’s an applause for a cast who brought these characters to life with honesty and without flinching, including Morrissey, who made Clive exactly as ordinary and therefore exactly as terrifying as he needed to be. But more than anything, it’s me trying to put into words something I’ve been carrying around for a while, which is that the fear a lot of us feel right now is not an overreaction, and it is not nothing, and we are allowed to name it.

Every tiny little thing. And there is a violence behind it.