Russell T Davies: ‘Do I rub people the wrong way? I think I’m one of the nicer ones!’

A surprising number of people can’t stand Russell T Davies . His new memoir , which chronicles his rise from soap opera writers’ rooms to crafting some of the most significant and influential British television of the past 25 years, is littered with tales of conflicts, arguments and confrontations. There are the gay men who take him to task for not adequately representing them on Queer as Folk ; the Doctor Who fans upset with his years of – in their eyes – running their favourite show into the proverbial ground; the old head of personnel at the BBC who forgot he existed. “I like to think I’m a nice man,” he writes, “but when it comes to making a show great, I will do anything to make it better, even if that means trampling on people.” He declares at another juncture: “One writer got so upset that I rewrote his script that he didn’t speak to me for two years. I was so busy I didn’t notice.” He loves a squabble, Russell T Davies does. “I was at dinner with a bunch of gay people dying to f***ing savage me,” he writes. “I was just grinning through the whole thing.” Davies, in front of me and all 6 ft 6 inches of him, seems perfectly lovely. He’s Welsh and loud and ingratiating. Avuncular, almost. I like the guy. But I can’t help but wonder – does he ever think he rubs people the wrong way? “I think I’m one of the nicer ones!” he hoots. I must shoot him a look of scepticism, because he can tell I’m not buying it. “I do!” He goes on. “It’s obviously a tough, opinionated job. It’s obviously an arrogant job. You’ve got to sit there and say, ‘I’ve written a script and I believe it’s worth £10m. So give me that £10m to make this.’” But, he admits, it’s also a job that requires a lot of bluster. “Being a writer means you doubt every word you’ve ever written,” he explains. “So when I say ‘arrogant’, it’s also hand in hand with the exact opposite. I’m brilliant and I’m rubbish. I’m gorgeous and I’m ugly. But I think that’s how all of us get through life every single day. And what I do is take that constant sense of doubt I have and channel it into my work. And it helps to have an edge.” I’d be ambushed by straight male TV presenters who were out to bring me down, and I loved it He thinks his life wouldn’t be what it is today if he didn’t. He remembers working at Granada Television in the early Nineties, a period that marked his transition out of children’s entertainment and into soaps. “I went into those commissioning conferences wearing a leather jacket with a rocket on the back, and my hair so henna it was orange,” he says. “I was a big f***ing firework. But I put on that leather jacket because I was ready for a fight.” He found that people listened to him. It was his way of getting ahead. A young Sally Wainwright, who would go on to create Happy Valley and Last Tango in Halifax , was in those rooms, too. “She’d sit there in silence, because we were around a lot of middle-aged men who’d been there for 40 years and who did not encourage the women in the room to speak. She has quite bad memories of it. If she’d write a memoir about that same time, you’d hear two completely different experiences. But there is an abrasiveness to me. Just from the fact that I’m very tall and very loud. So who is getting the spotlight?” He points to himself. “So I’m aware of that, and I’ve used it to my advantage.” There’s little real biography in The Queerest of Folk , Davies’ new memoir. Instead it’s about a life in television – watching it, making it, existing through it. His upbringing, as part of an ordinary working class family in Swansea, is condensed to a handful of paragraphs in the preface. Each subsequent chapter is devoted to a show Davies has worked on, from the biggies like Queer as Folk to the celebrated Aids drama It’s a Sin and this year’s urgent, brutal Tip Toe . “The book is like a work in motion,” he says. “It’s about being busy, about deadlines, about coping with parts of life while balancing the actual practicalities of the job.” He says he’s had no formal education in writing, beyond “watching television for every day of my life”. He hopes people are inspired by it. It’s hard to overstate Davies’ importance to the landscape of British television . His work straddles an abundance of tones; sometimes it’s harrowing, sometimes it’s hokey, often it’s completely unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. Queer as Folk , the show that put him on the map in 1999, depicted gay life as fun, sexy and nuanced, Davies stoking the fires of right-wing zealotry in the process. In 2005, he rescued Doctor Who from 16 years on the scrap heap and it became an instant phenomenon; it was a chintzy, earnest sci-fi spectacle beamed onto the Saturday night schedules once again. Over time his work has become more layered and sincere, It’s a Sin arguably his masterpiece. Russell T Davies with Jos Gibson (right) and ‘Queer as Folk’ star Charlie Hunnam in 1999 (Russell T Davies) Because of all this, he holds a unique position in British culture, as a television showrunner with real name recognition. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” he says. “My face has become well known, too, which I find very strange. I think a writer was born to sit at home and type, and it’s become a very different job now.” He blames himself, having stepped up to be the face of Queer as Folk when it first premiered. “It came in for a lot of attacks when it started, and a lot of people tried to bring it down,” he says. (He quotes in the book one column by The Daily Mail ’s Lynda Lee-Potter, in which she proclaimed that Britain is “hell-bent on destruction” for allowing “naked actors to have relentless homosexual sex” on television.) “In moments like that, it’s not fair to expect the cast to stand up and argue gay politics. It’s not their job.” So Davies would appear on Right to Reply to defend the show, or TalkSport to defend gay men entirely. “I’d be ambushed by straight male presenters who were out to bring me down, and I loved it,” he recalls. “I found myself in hostile environments and I survived them. I found that I could argue with them, or at least hold my own.” Davies’ fame only grew with the launch of Doctor Who Confidential , a spin-off show that took fans directly behind the scenes of the main series. He’d appear constantly, sharing how the sausage is made. “The cast couldn’t do it all, so other people had to step forward. My greatest curse is that I can do it very well. I’ve put my foot in it hundreds of times, but I’m not bad at negotiating the pitfalls and the mistakes either.” Perhaps, I suggest, that connection to audiences is why Doctor Who fans feel so comfortable laying into him to this day, blaming him for the show’s creative decline and falling ratings. (It was this year rested by the BBC, which also put the franchise out to competitive tender.) “It’s a very volatile fandom,” he says. “Sometimes people can be a bit rude, but then others will be genuinely lovely and want to chat about Time Lords and Daleks with you when they spot you on the street.” Davies with one of the Weeping Angels from ‘Doctor Who’ (Russell T Davies) But he must see the comments, surely? The hundreds of X threads devoted to his apparent terribleness? “Well, I’m not on X,” he says. “And let’s not discuss it as a reasonable public platform. It’s a hate site, so of course I don’t look on there.” His boyfriend, he says, sometimes looks at it, and sometimes his agents will flag things they find particularly worrying. And yes, amid an influx of abuse from anti-trans or homophobic trolls, he has taken to keeping a kitchen knife by his front door just in case. But he doesn’t want pity. “It’s insane,” he continues. “But we’re living in a world where flat Earthers are gaining credibility, and where vast swathes of the American population think we didn’t land on the moon. Any misinformation about me is tiny compared to the vast misinformation that’s out there about the rest of the world.” There’s an undeniable steeliness to Davies, which is easy to miss when he’s being so outwardly jolly. Subjects that might make others clam up are discussed with florid vitriol. He can’t abide religion, for instance, and boasts that he once wrote a drama series – The Second Coming , in which a video shop worker declares himself the son of God – “about what bollocks it is”. I mention how he condemns Gwyneth Paltrow in the book for saying in an interview that she felt disturbed by the presence of an intimacy coordinator while filming a sex scene last year, and insisted they back off during production. (She later clarified that she didn’t intend to “pooh-pooh” the role, only that she’s from “a different time” and was unused to it, adding: “If I was starting today, or if my daughter wants to go into this, I’m so glad that there’s now this role and that she will learn, OK, there’s consent, and there are guardrails.”) Davies’ complaints are fair, I say, because Paltrow can be generally annoying. “She’s worse than annoying, she’s dangerous ,” he interrupts. “When powerful people say that intimacy coordinators shouldn’t exist, you’re creating a world in which you get permission for that job not to exist, and then someone powerless is going to be absolutely trapped. It’s monstrous.” He’s always felt strongly about creating safe sets. He served as a kind of proto-intimacy coordinator on Queer as Folk , decades before intimacy coordinators became commonplace, as he was often the only gay man involved in the shooting of its sex scenes. “The director was a straight man, the actors were straight men. They brought me in just to look at the physical practicalities of what was going on, and we did this in a rehearsal room at the BBC, so in a way doing it very safely and wisely. And I’m so proud of what we did in the past because it led to the present.” Davies with his late partner, Andrew Smith (Russell T Davies) Davies lives between Manchester and Swansea, and has been with his partner Oliver Cole – a 27-year-old model – since last year. He lets any criticism of their relationship bounce off him, too. “You realise that it’s got nothing to do with you,” he says. “I have a level of fame where you will be spoken about, and it just hasn’t ever got to me. I’m lucky. I’m financially sound, I’m happy and safe and comfortable.” He shrugs. Cole came into his life seven years after the death of Davies’ long-time partner Andrew Smith, who had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. The passages of Davies’ memoir where he writes about Smith’s final years are some of the most tender and human in the book, Davies describing a man who never fussed over his TV career, and certainly wasn’t interested in being in the spotlight alongside him. “He was such a modest man that he’d think it was so bad that his name is in print in the book,” he laughs. “But the reason he’s front and centre of the book is because he was the front and centre of my life.” Andrew was originally told he had just 18 months to live, but this proved to be incorrect. He lived with the tumour for seven years before his death in 2018, with Davies alternating between caring for him and writing several hits, notably the Hugh Grant/Ben Whishaw drama A Very English Scandal . Russell T Davies’ ‘The Queerest of Folk’ (Bantam) At one point in the book, Davies parallels his partner’s declining health with the illnesses he’s seen on TV. “Some deaths are full of s*** and blood and agony,” he writes. “You can see why Andrew’s form of cancer is very often chosen as a soap-opera death, because it can be calm and quiet.” Some of those last experiences with his partner inspired scenes in It’s a Sin . “There were moments of his illness that I put into the boys dying, and quite unashamedly because it was real .” Does he view everything through the lens of writing? “Everything’s grist to the mill, yeah,” he says. “It sounds quite merciless, but everything’s material.” He tells me he’s still trawling through some of those experiences with Andrew to this day. “There were emotions I had after he died that I didn’t know existed, and that haven’t quite got a name,” he says. He remembers having to take some of Andrew’s clothes to the funeral home where his body was being stored, and then leaving without seeing him. “I felt absolutely corrupt, and like I’d committed a betrayal,” he says. “It was as if I’d been to a house that he was in and I hadn’t seen him. And I found it so profoundly wrong that I found it quite fascinating.” He frowns, a flash of sadness stretching across his face. “One day I’ll put it in a script.” ‘The Queerest of Folk: A Life in Television’ is out now, published by Bantam