‘He strikes me as a man unprepared to sweat the small stuff’

On a sunny Tuesday in Swansea, I went to meet the man responsible for my sexual awakening: a 6ft 6in, 63-year-old Dr Who fanatic.

Russell T Davies found fame – and infamy – in 1999, when he wrote Queer As Folk, a paean to gay life that scandalised the rightwing press and whipped me into a state of rapture. I was 11, and possibly not the intended audience but was nonetheless entranced. Section 28 – a law forbidding the promotion of homosexuality in schools – was still in force and gay people were either depicted as pitiable punchlines or cautionary tales who inevitably died of Aids. Queer As Folk was an unseen perspective, featuring characters who lived raucous, unapologetic, Technicolour lives. It was funny, hot and – crucially – aspirational. Watching it inoculated me against any terror of growing up gay. It planted a (rainbow) flag in the ground that I would spend my teenage years pelting towards, unconcerned with the disapproval of my family, teachers and peers, whom I now considered basic. It was a lifejacket for boys like me.

In the proceeding 27 years, Davies has continued to be the great documentarian of gay British life. Most recently, his drama Tip Toe asked what follows queer visibility; what if they see us and still don’t like us? Before that, It’s a Sin was a surprise hit after initially being turned down by all of the main channels. In between writing what he terms his “gay stuff”, Davies successfully rebooted Dr Who 16 years after it had gone off the air (his earliest memory is of watching William Hartnell regenerate). It became one of the most-watched shows on British television. Now he’s publishing a book, The Queerest of Folk, taking us behind the scenes on these shows and more. In it, I learned that Hugh Grant was, at one point, in the frame to play Doctor Who, and that Davies turned down jobs writing on Skyfall, a George Lucas Star Wars project and Succession. Glam!

During our interview for this week’s Saturday magazine, Davies is as affable as his reputation suggests. He cheerfully submits to questions about the backlash to his second tenure as showrunner of Dr Who (it was a “shame”, but he liked his episodes so doesn’t really care), and reactions to his new boyfriend, who is 37 years younger (“I was dreading what [Davies’ longtime producer] Nicola Shindler might think. Then she met him and said, ‘Oh! I get it, he’s lovely’”). He strikes me as a man unprepared to sweat the small stuff, perhaps as a consequence of having quit work for two years to nurse his husband, Andrew Smith, who died of brain cancer in 2018. In the book, he writes about arriving home from the hospital after telling Smith that he was going to die, to discover a box on the porch containing the Rose d’Or award, which he’d won for A Very English Scandal. “Awards are meaningless, and that just proves it,” he tells me. “Although it does make a good story.”

He’s happiest working, and is busy writing a secret project, which he promises will have a happy ending after the violence and terror of Tip Toe. Before that, he’s collaborating with Rambert and the Pet Shop Boys on a contemporary dance adaptation of It’s a Sin. Can’t say gayer than that.

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Isabelle Aron
Commissioning editor, Saturday