Russell T Davies is returning to UK television with a three-pronged penis. After a period in Los Angeles following his revival of Doctor Who, he is back in his spiritual (and actual) heartland of Manchester’s gay community. Three concurrent new series, Cucumber, Banana and Tofu, take their names from the findings of a Swiss scientific institute that spent 10 years studying the male erection. They came up with four categories: tofu, peeled banana, unpeeled banana and, finally, the mighty cucumber. Davies is going to get letters.
“Did you think it’s rude?” chirps the giant Welshman as we meet to discuss his comeback. “I showed it to my boyfriend and he said, ‘Oh, it’s a bit rude isn’t it?’ I said, ‘I can be a lot ruder…’”
His new project isn’t out to titillate, however. Navigating the sex lives of gay men in the 21st century, it’s about sex, rather than being overtly sexual – although obviously there are scenes that some may find risque (“You may as well complain that a cookery show has too much food in it,” Davies notes drily). Famously, Davies shot to fame with 1999’s groundbreaking Queer As Folk, becoming one of the most in-demand writers on TV in the process. This gave him the leverage to successfully marshal the 2005 return of Doctor Who. A stint in LA followed and Cucumber was initially developed there, before the illness of his partner brought him home.
Where Queer As Folk focused on the hedonistic exploits of twentysomethings on Manchester’s Canal Street, its not-quite-sequel Cucumber explores what happens when the party’s over, as curmudgeonly fortysomething Henry (a career-defining turn from Vincent Franklin) undergoes a spectacular midlife crisis. When his old world collapses, he finds himself living in a loft with a 19-year-old colleague and his flatmate. That set-up leads into E4 companion show Banana, a series of one-off stories about Cucumber’s younger characters, while 4oD’s Tofu is a documentary about real-life sex stories.
The crossover character is Dean, played by 26-year-old Fisayo Akinade, a plucky young promiscuous chancer. “He’s so much more open and confident with his sexuality, and there’s no shying away from it or pretending,” says the openly gay actor. “He just goes about and lives his life because he hasn’t had to hide; whereas Henry and his generation had to be more considered. There’s been a progression of broader acceptance, which means you can be on Grindr on the bus and it’s not a problem. It’s no longer confined to Canal Street.”
Dean spins a tragic yarn about being thrown out by his violent stepdad after coming out. But after being ordered home by his flatmate Freddie (Freddie Fox) to ask for rent money, we see a loving, supportive family, whom he simply provokes into kicking off. “I think he came out expecting it to be ‘Oh my God!’ and actually it was really lovely,” adds Akinade. “I think he resents the fact that he doesn’t have a big dramatic coming-out story. He creates this lie to seem a bit more interesting and dramatic. And what I love is that when he goes back home, all the drama is caused by him!”
While Cucumber is solidly and specifically the story of one gay man, Banana runs the whole LGBT gamut in its breadth of characters, and deliberately so. “Whether Cucumber works or not, it’s going to occupy a space as ‘the new gay drama’,” says Davies. “And I went through that on Queer As Folk – many voices raised themselves up in alarm, especially lesbian voices, saying they weren’t represented. Fair enough, but I’ll talk about representation forever – it’s the natural reaction of the minority. But it’s not about representation. You don’t write drama from the point of view of equality, you write it from stories and the heart and the pulse of these people. But of course there are other voices, I just can’t put them into Cucumber. Cucumber would be the worst drama in the world if I went, ‘Let’s go and see the transsexual living next door and the lesbian couple upstairs.’ Actually that might be a very good drama, but the point of Cucumber is it’s very focused on one man.”
Telling younger, broader stories in Banana also allowed Davies to nurture new talent and voices. As well as one by Sue Perkins, two episodes were written by newcomer Charlie Covell (“I think she’s the bee’s knees!”), and starring in another is trans comedian Bethany Black, in her first drama role.
Black becomes the first trans actor to play a trans role in a UK drama. Davies was so determined for this to be the case, he insisted that if they couldn’t find somebody, the script be rewritten. Black turned up at the 11th hour.
“When we started filming,” she says, “a few of us were talking about trans people playing trans people on screen, which still doesn’t happen very often. It was after Jared Leto had won an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. They were going, ‘Yeah, that was a great performance’. No, it really wasn’t. It was a cisgender guy trying to play what he thought a trans woman would be like, which was just a very camp gay man. About three days into shooting they came over and said, ‘Yes you’re right, I can see how it’s different.’ So I’m glad things are moving on. I think we’ll reach a point in a few years time where we look on it like It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.”
For Black, the fact that her character Helen is completely comfortable in her skin has a profound personal resonance. “I think that was deliberate by Russell to show that the world has moved on now. I’m pleased we’ve done that. When I was 17 and struggling with this, and active addiction, and active alcoholism, I was desperately trying to destroy myself, trying to make what was going on around me as intolerable as possible, so that my parents could disown me before I could really disappoint them. Because that’s all you ever saw – that if you did come out you’d lose all your friends and family and would have to go off eating spiders under a bridge somewhere. These horrible stories. But when I came out to my parents, they were absolutely fine with it.”
The other striking thing about Banana is that for an LGBT drama, it features precisely no coming-out stories. Everyone is fine with their identity and the parents involved are all uniformly brilliant. “It’s actually the next generation of stories,” nods Davies. “You look at Johnny coming out in EastEnders, it’s beautifully done. Once you’ve got the bedrock of soap opera behind you telling what you might call the more ‘everyday’ gay stories, if you’re on Channel 4 in 2015 you can say, ‘Let’s look at the really complicated things that happen in families.’ Just because your parents are happy with your gayness doesn’t mean your life’s fine. That’s the whole point with the young characters. Making the mass generalisation that it’s OK, or easier, to be out at 18 now, with that comes a presumption that your life is happy. No 18-year-old is happy! You will have problems. You will make your life a problem, or find problems. I wanted to explore that, to say, equality doesn’t mean happiness. That’s where the story begins. That’s where straight drama started thousands of years ago.”
Davies told Gay Times last year that he plans to devote the rest of his career to writing gay drama. His next passion project is a period piece about the ravages of Aids in the 1980s. After that, he wants to do something examining gay men’s “civil war over campness”.
For now though, Cucumber/Banana looks like being the next definitive gay tract of our times. From the vantage point of Henry’s generation, what does Russell think are the main differences between his outlook on life and that of Dean and his Banana buddies? “Part of the point of my writing it is to say how similar they are. Try discussing how different a young gay man’s life is from a middle-aged gay man’s life and you actually just end up discussing apps. Grindr is just a shorter version of going to a bar. Dramatically, that’s fantastic, you can tell stories a lot faster if you want to. But falling in love is the same. Falling out is the same. Lust is the same. Availability is the same. Even before apps, it wasn’t hard to get sex if you looked like Freddie Fox! But I think the differences are very, very interesting. I think Dean is quite a new type of character, when he goes home and sits with his family, having that conversation, wilfully going on Grindr in front of them, wilfully swearing, wilfully causing a problem. He loves his gayness to be the source of trouble where otherwise they would be completely happy with it. That’s starting to explore new stuff.”
He considers it all for a second, before breaking out into one of his trademark throaty laughs. “Nonetheless, I think it all comes down to our determination to fuck up our own lives in the end. That’s the key note!”
Cucumber starts Thu, 9pm, Channel 4; Banana starts Thu, 10pm, E4; the first episode of Tofu will be available on 4oD the same day
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