Each week Joe and Terry discuss Starz’s import of Channel 4’s Tip Toe, alternating between our respective sites.

Spoilers follow for Episode 2: Leo suspects that someone's been in his house. Meanwhile, George sends Leo a disturbing message. And when electrician Clive starts work at Leo's bar, a chain of events leads to a shocking conclusion.

TERRY

We’re only two episodes in and, Joe, this show is turning into a downward spiral if I’ve ever seen one. Now that all of the characters are established, Russell T Davies immediatelys turns up the temperature to almost scalding.

First, we’re given a little more information about how the show will end, as we see the inside of the Goss household and it looks like a small tornado whipped through. A party obviously ensued the night things went sideways. I would hazard a guess that this is the remnants of another football party, which, to me, starts to paint a horrifying picture of what happened.

Into the mess steps George (Jackson Connor), shirtless and with the letters “FLO” written in marker on his back. He looks dazed (or hungover) as he looks outside to see Leo (Alan Cumming) hanging from the lightpole. We see a different angle and it’s obvious that Leo didn’t do this to himself; the way the rope is tied and supported tell us immediately that this was a lynching. But George is either too dazed, too hungover, or too apathetic to really react and instead takes the most unappetizing slice of pizza off the floor and begins eating it.

After this cold open, we’re told that this episode takes place 6 days before the incident (down from 10). Leo takes Clive (David Morrissey) to Spit & Polish to have some work done on the bad electricity. And it becomes as awkward, funny and horrifying as we’d expect it to be. From basically every letter in LGBTQ showing up, loud and proud, to Mikey (Gabriel Clark) recognizing Saul (Joseph Evans) from OnlyFans and offering to collab with him.

Meanwhile, Leo is still struggling with the knowledge that George is gay, blocked Leo on Grindr (“Cheeky little bitch,” Leo muses), and completely ignores him in person. In a funny exchange that turns alternately wholesome and horrifying, given the implications, George unblocks Leo to send one word: “Help.” Then there’s also the matter of Leo’s ex Curtis (Charlie Condou) and new beau Maggie (Clare Calbraith) who’ve invited Leo and Stephanie (Elizabeth Berrington) to an awkward dinner to announce that they’re going to be foster parents.

The string holding all of this together is people putting on an outward face to mask inside pain or insecurities. Take Clive’s macho football party at his house, where everyone is drunk and raucous. One of the blokes pulls down his pants and moons everyone, including, I might add, 16-year-old George. Here, Clive is all laughs and bravado, but we know that that’s just a facade. And of course, this bit of nudity is okay for George to experience because it’s “manly”.

Obviously, things at home aren’t going well, and all the laughs and cheer at the party masks the pain the Goss family is quietly going through. But it also shows up in the small moments, like when Clive gets the wiring working at the bar and does a little dance to the disco music that begins playing. For that brief moment, we get to see a different side to Clive, before he realizes what he’s doing and then goes back to his stoic, “masculine” self.

But those masks don’t just exist for Clive. In a lot of ways, Leo’s situation is very similar. The world sees Leo as a loud and proud gay man, who embellishes stories and has that Alan Cumming-twinkle in his eye. The casting couldn’t be better, honestly, because Alan can disarm anyone with just a mischievous smile. At the dinner party, he repeats his embellished naked-in-the-street story (side note: it’s interesting that Maggie immediately calls him on the story), but when it’s just him and Curtis, he breaks down crying.

Additionally, there’s Saul’s double life as a cam boy jacking off for anyone who subscribes – though he makes it clear to Mikey that, in his mind, it’s “supposed” to be just women watching. He has his own disarming quality, politely fending off Mikey’s invitation to collab…but then he immediately goes to his father and makes the whole thing a joke, like, “Can you believe this gay guy?” who Saul implies basically begged Saul to fuck him. That veneer of toxic masculinity rears its head.

Finally, there’s the quiet pain belonging to the closeted George, who feels completely isolated from his family, friends and his first love. The conversation between him and Leo was so heartbreaking, Joe.

This episode feels just as dense as the first episode, Joe! And there’s still a lot more to talk about. What do you think about the three different kinds of men in the Goss household and how they all seem completely isolated from each other? Did you gasp when Clive told George that his phone isn’t private until he’s 18? And, continuing with that thought, did the final shot of the episode shock you as much as it did me?

JOE

There’s a lot of secrets and lies going on in the Goss house, isn’t there? The point that got me (especially in relation to toxic masculinity) is when Clive catches George up late, texting, and a) immediately assumes it’s with a girl who has made George upset and b) warns his 16 year-old son “They’re not worth it. Not a one of them”. What a thing to tell your son…especially considering you’re married to his mother!

But obviously the central relationship between Clive and Marie (Pooky Quesnel) is pretty bad. We catch a glimpse of her admonishing him following the football party before Clive heads off to sleep in a separate bed and it seems significant that this heated exchange immediately precedes George unblocking Leo to ask for help.

The emotional crux of the episode is absolutely the lengthy exchange between George and Leo.* It’s a rollercoaster, though: Leo gets annoyed at the boy, then circumvents the block by finding his number using a group chat for the whole block (invasive!) before prodding the teen into admitting the issue.

*Sidebar: I love how Davies’ teleplay and Peter Hoar’s direction trusts us to follow the conversation almost dialogue-free for what feels like at least three minutes. It puts a lot of emphasis on Cummings and Jackson Connor’s faces and makes it even more powerful when Leo finally realizes he needs to use his voice to reassure the boy.

It’s far too much, too quickly. My husband, who was watching with me, became extremely uncomfortable with Leo’s intensity (“Is he obsessed with this kid?) and I think, given how stories get spun and misinterpreted on the show, that’s definitely going to become an issue. Leo obviously recognizes a cry for help from a closeted teen necessitates an intervention, but even as he does the perfect “it gets better” elder gay monologue for the boy, all I could think about was how Leo’s words can be spun out of context by someone like Clive, who’s back is always up when it comes to “you people” (ie: the queer community, but especially gay men).

Not helping matters are the aforementioned events at the bar. I was pissed, frankly, about how Saul handles Mikey’s offer. He’s pleased by the attention initially, intrigued by how much money Mikey makes catering to gay men (hello, that’s where the real $$$ is!), but then he positions himself as a victim of insatiable gay desire when he relates the story to his father.

It’s maddening because - as someone with a father like Clive - you know better than to make these kinds of comments because they will be misinterpreted. And, of course, this comes out right after Melba (Paul Rhys) has let it slip that Leo was talking about Clive’s sons AND Benny from the brewery has loudly and proudly described taking a dozen facials the night before. Bad timing all around, which is something the series knows how to spin into both tragedy and tension.

I’ll confess I wondered how much juice Davies and co. could wring from this premise, but after two episodes it’s clear that the pressure is just going to keep mounting as the misunderstandings and miscommunications pile up. Which leads us to the cliffhanger: Clive is already suspicious and annoyed by Leo eyeballing his elder son when we get the (not very surprising) reveal that the person moving items around Leo’s house is none other than George. And, of course, he’s only a pair of boxers when Leo and Clive open the door to Leo’s flat.

Oh Terry! Me thinks that “not private” phone, with a voice message from Leo reassuring George about all of the hot sex he’ll have in the future is about to become a fucking grenade on top of a nuclear arsenal.

Back to you: what did you think of the ending? Were you hissing at everyone - from Judy to Mikey to Leo himself - to keep their voices down when they were talking about George while Clive worked downstairs? And was the tangent involving the other Canal Street business owners, featuring Leo’s inadvertent ableism, a lesbian scuffle involving Israel/Palestine and a comment about “the left eating itself” a little too much forced commentary?

TERRY

This whole episode was me sinking lower and lower into my chair, Joe. The first episode established how gossip seems to become the de facto truth in this neighborhood (between all the gossip percolating in the Goss household, as well as with Leo…and that’s not even taking into consideration Bridget across the street), I’m now carefully watching everything that’s said around Clive. There’s too much fluid ambiguity in what’s happening and what’s being said in these first two episodes that Clive’s homophobic case is basically being made for him.

We establish the first time we meet Clive that he has a very suspicious view of gay men (and, presumably the entire rainbow of queerness). More specifically, he seems to believe that gay men are immediately pedophiles and you shouldn’t trust your kids around them. Then you add Saul into the Spit & Polish mix, which causes all of the staff to run their mouths. Thanks to Clive’s misguided beliefs, the hub-bub that Saul causes suggests that they’re also having inappropriate thoughts about his other son. Those damned gays, Joe.

Then, Leo’s benign slip of the tongue about “the other son” tugs at Clive’s ear (coupled with Leo’s embellishment of the story that started the series off), and opinions and biases rear their ugly head. It also doesn’t help that Leo, in frustration, yells “Fuck you kid!” so loudly through their shared walls at home that Clive hears it. The episode ending with a half-dressed George in Leo’s house is just the cherry on top.

Personally, I found the truck ride conversation between Leo and Clive to be the heart of the episode. We’re shown Clive’s friends’ bawdy behavior, including the mooning, but that’s okay because it’s straight guys being guys. The moment sexuality enters the picture, however, “boys will be boys” suddenly becomes “gay men are predators." I loved Leo’s comment that if one of Clive’s friends had a hot 25 year old daughter, it wouldn’t have been a problem.

I’ll end with your question about the potential forced commentary. I’ll be honest, some of the first episode felt a little heavy handed, be it preachy and/or preaching to the choir. I agreed with everything that was being said, but some of the conversations felt produced solely to get the social commentary out. To a certain extent, the truck ride also felt this way, but the discussion there, at least, felt more grounded and a natural byproduct of what preceded it.

The Canal Street business meeting, on the other hand, felt utterly shoehorned in.

I get what Davies is trying to do here, though some of it feels like “old man yells at clouds, news at nine”, particularly the comment about how “the left would eat itself and the feasting has begun”. But what the conversation highlighted for me is how even the queer community isn’t a monolith and divisions still exist. Still, I’m not sure what Davies is trying to say by bringing the Israel/Palestine situation up…the issue is raised but then just as quickly dropped (much like the casual ableism).

I don’t know, Joe. The commentary works better, for me at least, when the bigotry and biases show up in the everyday conversations and arguments with Clive, rather than these little asides. Am I off-base here? Do you have thoughts on these little stingers Davies has peppered throughout these first two episodes? Do you want to just thrash everyone because they are all talking through each other? Finally, what do you think about the revelation that Leo is trying to buy the bar from Curtis and that Curtis is taking 20% in a world where you can’t make money, as Leo says, in hospitality?

JOE

It does seem surprising to me that Leo and Curtis are still business partners, if only because the brief glimpse we get of Curtis suggests that he’s more than moved on from the queer/Canal street life. I appreciated that in this episode we heard that between his flat (which he inherited from his parents) and the bar that barely turns a profit, Leo is completely mortgaged out*

*Money is another persistent theme in the series - from the scant profits of the hospitality industry to Clive’s need to pick up extra work at the bar, and the back and forth about how much the electrical work is costing Leo. The two main sources of conflict in most media remains sex and money and, after two episodes, Tip Toe is leaning heavily into both.

Otherwise I would have believed he would have tried to buy Curtis’ share (or perhaps, given the cry he shares with his ex, we’re meant to believe that a part of Leo still hopes they’ll get back together so he hasn’t wanted to give up their sole remaining connection?)

As for the political commentary, I, too, find it a little awkwardly show-horned in, but I agree with you that Davies is making efforts to ensure that the queer community isn’t being seen as a monolith. As much as the “left turning on itself/feasting” comment landed with a thud…it’s not entirely untrue (looking at you, American Democrats!) It’s hard to get too mad at the series for being a little heavy handed, though; sometimes the quiet part needs to be said out loud, such as when Melba refused to back down at the end of episode 1 about how dangerously political times are for the queer community.

Sidebar: Melba’s refusal to read the room when they were talking about Leo’s comments about Clive’s boys, on the other hand?! WTF Melba!

So now we’re basically up to the mid-point episode and I’ll be curious to see what, if any, new escalations emerge. Obviously this George situation will need to be dealt with, and I can’t wait to see how he and Clive extricate themselves from this predicament (especially since George is so deeply closeted that he won’t even tell his friends, or girlfriends, about his sexuality). I guarantee that things will only get more awkward and uncomfortable!

But before we leave this episode behind, Terry, I do want to return to George’s predicament. I truly didn’t know what to expect when he messaged Leo for help (I imagine most of us worried that he’s scared of his father’s intolerance and anger issues), so part of me liked the subversion that he’s had his heart broken. He’s in love with a (shitty sounding) boy who told George he loved him while cumming, and now laughs at him.

It’s classic YA fare, but it’s so powerfully - and achingly - delivered with George’s simple “But I love him” text when Leo advises him to be careful. (Ahh youth!) There’s such an elegant simplicity to George’s predicament that stands in stark contrast to the maelstrom of absolute shit that’s circling around him. It puts the framing device in perspective. In this tender moment, George is crying over a garbage lover he mistakenly thinks he loves; in six days, all of this will lead to the lynching death of his gay neighbour. Woof.

Tip Toe airs Fridays on Starz.