Television is an intimate art form, once beamed into living rooms, now on devices right in front of our faces. The screenwriter Russell T Davies understands that intimacy. Whether discussing his early days developing lost-to-history soap spin-offs, making a splash with the pioneering gay series Queer As Folk, or reviving Doctor Who to great acclaim, he makes it feel as if you’re at the pub with him, settling in for the night, ready to hear his best stories.
This warm and gossipy autobiography offers a peek behind the curtains of the British TV industry, and as such, it goes light on Davies’s own life story. Instead, he gallops through five decades in the business, using the framework of his TV shows to propel the book forward at great speed. He was born in Swansea in 1963, to a family who loved watching TV.
While he was studying English at Oxford, a friend suggested that, as he thought television was so great, he should consider doing it as his job. That proved to be a lightbulb moment. Davies worked on children’s television, writing for puppets, before cutting his teeth at Granada Studios in Manchester, alongside Sally Wainwright, Paul Abbott and the great, late Kay Mellor.
A little later, having created a period drama called The Grand, he found that viewers were turning off. Ladling on the misery with abuse, murder and a hanging obviously wasn’t working. There is another revelation: a friend tells him he is funny, so he should write like that.
Afterwards, there is no stopping him. Humour drives Queer As Folk, one of his defining creations. It is hard to overstate the impact of the Channel 4 show, which came out in 1999.
Back then, queer stories were still vanishingly rare and largely miserable. Industry people dismissed the idea, assuming that a story about gay men would be earnest and dull. The arrival of this funny, Technicolor and defiantly explicit series changed all that.
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