One scene still makes me catch my breath, with glee, fifteen years later. The swaggering Stuart comes out of his house to find someone has sprayed “QUEERS” all over his Jeep. Rather than being shamed, or cowed, to the horror of his teenage one-night stand, Nathan (Charlie Hunnam), Stuart leaps into the car, and drives Nathan up to his school gates—horn blaring as his schoolmates scatter. When they jeer—shouting, “Give us a kiss!,” and mincing around—Stuart shouts back, “I’ll give you a good fuck, you virgins!” before driving off again, gravel spraying—leaving Nathan staring after him, lovelorn.
Queer as Folk showed gay men, for the first time, as heroic, venal, clever, stupid, horny, heartbroken, foolish, noble—in short, as proper human beings, rather than just “hilarious camp best friends,” or “an issue.” It changed things overnight.
“People having televisions in their bedrooms was quite a recent thing, at that point,” Davies recalls. “So there was a generation of teenage gay boys who were actually deciding on their viewing habits, and watching this, in secret. And to this day those boys—now grown men—will come up to me and tell me how it changed their lives. Well, how much they wanked to it. Which is the same thing, let’s face it! Hahaha! I’m never sure how to respond to it. It depends on if they’re handsome or not, to be honest.”
Davies knew how important the show was: “To live as a gay man in the twenty-first century is a political act,” he says, simply. “There is a resonance to your existence that straight men just don’t have. It is a conversation. It is a topic. It needs TV shows.”
Davies didn’t exactly give up on writing about gay men after Queer as Folk—Doctor Who featured the groundbreaking Captain Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman, as a swashbuckling pansexual superhero who kissed the Doctor, on primetime BBC, and thereby, as I said earlier, did the unthinkable—made ten-year-old boys in school playgrounds fight over who was to play him in their games. This is something I would argue is one of the single greatest acts of cultural influence in the last fifty years.
Davies had, simply and beautifully, shown us love as being something universal, fundamental, and worth fighting for. In among all those aliens, love was an inalienable right—however you loved.
But Davies always knew he’d come back to a wholly gay drama one day.
“Cucumber is basically Queer as Folk, fifteen years on,” Davies says. “What are they doing now? How are they coping with middle age, careers, relationships, family, love? And, most of all, sex. What sex are they having?”
And it is sex—gay sex—that is Cucumber’s territory, fuel, and language.
“The first response about [gay issues] is always, ‘Why does it always have to be about sex?’ And I understand that. As a viewer, my heart sinks when bad stuff is just about sex,” Davies confesses. “But the only reason I wanted to write this is because Henry [the hero of Cucumber] doesn’t have sex—even though he’s been in a relationship for nine years. He doesn’t fuck. And to me, that’s new territory. I think it’s true of a lot of gay men. It was a story I was hearing over and over from friends. But it’s a huge secret—maybe our biggest. The only person I’ve ever seen publically stand up and say that he doesn’t have sex is Stephen Fry, and when he did [on a documentary last year], I was shouting, ‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP! THIS IS MY MATERIAL!’ I’d started writing this three years ago, and I was ahead of the curve then! I’d invented gay men not having sex, hahaha!”
Time and again, the biggest hinge on which homophobia’s gate hangs is sex—the fascination with, and horror of, penetrative sex. And it’s an unease with the subject that goes both ways.
“We had an early screening for Cucumber, and one man from Attitude got very upset, because he has the same sexual problem Henry has. And he apparently left the screening saying, ‘I don’t think that should be shown.’ Attitude magazine! The gays want to ban me! Hahaha!”
But while Cucumber is about sex, it is not just about sex. Rather, sex is seen as the animating force that connects everything—like the Dust in Philip Pullman’s novels. And so Cucumber is also about families, midlife crises, stalling careers, reinvention, racism, the Internet, pornography, being transgender, mortality—hope, and love, and loss, and joy. It’s also—and this is a given with a Russell T. Davies show—incredibly funny. The end of the first episode, which I don’t want to spoil, ends with a titanic nervous breakdown sound-tracked by Boney M.—something you just don’t get with Stephen Poliakoff.
Cucumber is about what a continual, never-ending, confusing, glorious, heartbreaking surprise life is. A series of waves we paddle on the surfboard of our desires—trying, once in a while, to stand and surf to the shore. Sometimes we make it onto the sand. More often than not, we fall, and go under, and start again.
Davies got the call when he was at Heathrow. It was 2011, and he and Andy had come home to the UK for two weeks, as Davies was midway through writing the first episode of Cucumber. Andy had taken the opportunity to go to his doctor, and check out the headaches he’d been having.
Davies was returning to LA early and called him—just before he checked his luggage onto the plane.
“Standing outside, leaning against the wall,” Davies recalls, with the vividness of those recalling something truly awful.
It turned out that Andy’s “sarcastically smiling Edwardian lady” wasn’t a charming form of synesthesia at all: he had a glioblastoma multiforme—a Grade 4 tumor, pressing into his brain.
“And there is no Grade 5,” Davies says. “After Grade 4, you just . . . die.”
And so all the plans were canceled. They couldn’t return to LA—Grade 4 brain tumors are not allowed on planes. Everything in LA was shipped back to Britain—to the house Davies had kept in Manchester. Cucumber was canceled. Everything was canceled.
“And thank God for money—all that money I had earned from Judoons, and farting Slitheens, and never spent,” Davies says. “Money I’d always saved for a rainy day. Because this . . . this was the monsoon.”
The prognosis was as simple as for there to be no prognosis: they would open up the side of Andy’s head, operate on him, and, after that—if he survived the operation—he would still only have a 3 percent chance of living.
“He was mad—quite mad,” Russell says, staring out of the window of the taxi. “He had a stroke, he was ranting and raving—one night, there was brain fluid pouring out of his ear, like a tap. And however marvelous everyone is—and you really do discover the goodness of your friends—true goodness—you are alone. Fuck me, you are alone. In that hospital. At three a.m., thinking, ‘He’s going to die.’ Planning what you’ll do next.”
Davies’s friends knew what he would do next: “They thought I was going to leave him!” he hoots. “They did! They all slowly admitted it! What the fuck did I look like? As if I’d go!”
The cab pulls to a halt, in a pleasant street, outside a well-kept, normal-looking 1930s house, with bright glass in the door.
“Come in, come in,” Davies says, opening the door.
We walk into the hall. Through the window, straight ahead, is a small back garden. It has a full-sized Dalek, under a tree, in the rain. The plunger points straight at the house.
“I’m home, love,” Davies calls out.
And there, in the front room, is Andy—sitting on the sofa, with a seven-inch scar on the side of his head, beaming. He survived. He was one of the 3 percent. He was the unlikely happy ending most screenwriters would demur from writing.
“Good day?” he asks Davies as Davies kisses him.
“Yes!” Russell says, adjusting the blanket over Andy’s knee. “What are you watching? Eggheads? How marvelous. Tea, anyone?”
So this was how Cucumber was written and made, in the end. A show not for LA, and America, and a new life, after all—but back to Manchester: the world Davies has chronicled for so long, so brilliantly. Written between hospital appointments, and fear, and changing the bedclothes at two a.m.—for Channel 4, now; now that Davies knew he would be s
taying in Britain. Written when Davies finished his day as Andy’s carer and could start writing—at eleven p.m., midnight, one a.m.
This forced return and these intense, late-night writing sessions explain, perhaps, Cucumber’s particular vividness, and astonishing innovation. For Cucumber now is not just a single show, but a whole, ambitious world—it has a secondary drama, Banana, that runs alongside it, accompanied by a talk show, Tofu, to discuss the issues that are raised in every episode. There has never been a drama quite like it.
Glancing incidental characters have whole, stand-alone stories—a line in Cucumber triggers a whole, life-changing episode in Banana. The detailed interconnectedness of everyone’s lives. Drama attempting to mirror the true warp and weft of our astonishing, complex lives—painfully aware of how, even if you are the extra in someone else’s story, you are always the hero of your own.
Davies has brought, to the lives of ordinary middle-aged gay men in Manchester, the same sense of intricate universe he once brought to all of space and time in Doctor Who.
“Well, I realized something,” Davies says, bringing the teapot into the front room. “Who has one idea? They come bouncing and rolling and thundering in—like a stampede. They come in flocks, and storms, and tidal waves. I honestly think, now that I’ve passed fifty, and looked mortality in the eye with Andrew, that it’s a race to get those billion ideas down while I’m still alive. An actual race.”
And he pours the tea, in the middle of his own unlikely happy ending, as a Dalek peers through the window, in the rain.
Coffee Is Killing Us
Anxiety. Sometimes, it feels like it is the defining emotion of our age. But there may be a reason for that . . .
I was an anxious child. We were an anxious family. It was the eighties, and my father regularly rehearsed us for when the bomb fell on Wolverhampton: “As soon as we get the Four-Minute Warning, we’ll all get in the caravan, and drive to Wales,” he’d say. “We’ll live in the hedgerows. A man can live on just a handful of rice a day.”
Despite such a powerful and organized survival plan, the anxiety remained. It was an anxious house, with never enough money or space, and the breath of ten people condensed on the windows and ran down the inside of the glass, like rain—and that made you feel anxious, too. Eight children, all scared and rudderless, our anxieties knotted together, like rats’ tails.
But twenty-eight years after my first childhood anxiety-spasm—and despite graduating onto full-sized adult panic attacks—I have a pretty good handle on my anxiety. I basically treat myself like a nervy horse: lots of exercise, lots of sleep, lots of interesting work to keep the mind occupied, and generally avoiding being ridden hard by strangers.
I had a handle on my anxiety, that is, until this summer—when it suddenly took on a new force. There were several reasons—someone I love became troubled, work was ferocious, and it was the summer of Internet trolls and death threats. I would sit in the garden, under a parasol, in the rain, smoking and typing, seven days a week, feeling the anxiety rolling in over the clapboard fence and dripping down from the trees.
Occasionally, I would have thoughts that would leave me breathless and flattened. The worst one was, “When you go mad, just a single thought could break you,” which was rapidly followed by, “And that single thought is, ‘Just a single thought could break you.’”
This idea worked like some kind of horror key in my head—it allowed the doubling, and then quadrupling, of fear in less than a second. It multiplied endlessly—a castle full of roiling insects. Of course that was how you went mad. Just a single thought would break you. You got stuck in a thought and never got out of it again. Until it ended you.
Anxiety is a physical state—flooded with adrenaline, you are, essentially, constantly running for your life from the most terrifying beast, but while sitting on a chair, or cooking the tea, or talking to your children. My hands shook; my stomach was liquid. My skull was porous—I could feel the coronal suture between the frontal and temporal lobes straining, and fizzing.
My catchphrase became, around eight o’clock every night, saying, very quietly to my husband, “I’m feeling quite anxious”—trying to say the sentence as dully as possible, so that it might not alarm the flocks of seagulls picking over the day’s detritus in my head, with their hook-ended beaks, and cold gold eyes.
I became convinced that the anxiety was all tied in with the summer—partly because I was listening to the Triffids’ “Hell of a Summer” over and over: “It’s been a hell of a summer / To be lying so low / Dogs and cats dropping down in the street.”
The anxiety had come in with the sun, and in the calm, cold snap of autumn, it would die, like the wasps. The new term would, surely, find me calm, in a duffel coat, with my hands now still, and my head clean and clear again.
But September and October stayed unnervingly warm, and I spent the shortening evenings shaking, and Googling the side effects of antianxiety medications and the prices of remote farmhouses in Wales. A friend gave me a Valium, and I put it in my purse, pretty sure that I would take it at some point in the next few weeks, and then go to my doctor and ask for more, and then leave London. At thirty-eight, I had finally been beaten by anxiety. The bomb had dropped, and I was going to go and live in a hedge.
And then? And then, two weeks ago, I suddenly “remembered” something: that I was drinking a whole twelve-cup cafetiere of coffee before midday. I put the pot in front of my husband with the words, “So—that’s my usual breakfast.”
“Jesus Christ!” he said, alarmed. “How have you managed that?”
“We have big cups.” I shrugged.
“You’ve basically been drinking gunpowder,” he said. “I sometimes feel a bit edgy after one latte.”
So I quit, obviously. I resigned from being some kind of chain-smoking, caffeine-drinking lizard, and went back to my previous drink of choice: hot Bovril. Within twenty-four hours of putting the coffeepot in the basement, I’d turned back into something much more low-key, and mammalian—with small, manageable thoughts, and still hands. The seagulls are gone. My head feels perfectly solid, and untroubled.
On the bad side, I’ve now put on half a stone, and I’m asleep by ten thirty p.m.; but on the good side: I am not living in a hedge. It turns out naturally anxious people should not drink 2,544 milligrams of caffeine a day. But then, you probably knew that.
TV Review: Elizabeth Taylor: Auction of a Lifetime—“Not So Vulgar Now, Is It?”
There are various things I suspect I’ll spend my lifetime writing about, over and over again: David Bowie, the moon, progress, Benedict Cumberbatch’s face, being a girl, and Elizabeth Taylor. My Cumberbatch moment is coming in a minute, but before we get there, here’s the Elizabeth Taylor piece for this book. Because you can never write enough about Elizabeth Taylor.
What was Elizabeth Taylor? A beauty. A force of nature. A bomb that went off over and over again, shrapnel flying outward, while she carried on walking, calmly, out of the epicenter—unblinking, on whisky, in heels.
The conceit of Elizabeth Taylor: Auction of a Lifetime was a neat one: telling the well-known story of her life again—but this time through her jewelry. Has anyone ever been so closely associated with jewels? Richard Burton bought her not one but two of the biggest diamonds in the world, and such was her power that, the next morning, they renamed the Cartier Diamond “the Taylor-Burton Diamond.” She named her perfume White Diamonds; she demanded precious tributes for every project she worked on. Unbreakable, dazzling, and elemental herself, she was obviously amused by the similarities she found in diamonds.
“All the producers she worked for were regular donors [to her collection],” a friend recalled. “She would ring them and go [assumes little girl voice], ‘Ray, I haven’t had my pressie yet.’” And so another velvet box or bag would travel from Bulgari to Taylor: another cold handful of glitter for the hottest woman in the world.
“Look at that ice cube on your finger, dear,” an i
nterviewer on CBS’s 60 Minutes said to her, in 1970. Taylor is wearing a diamond approximately the size of a custard cream. “It’s to keep me cool,” Taylor coos, coolly.
But why was she so obsessed with jewelry? Auction of a Lifetime repeatedly returned to the question: Was Taylor’s love of jewelry some manner of compensatory mechanism? Or did she just really love expensive shiny shit?
For a full ninety minutes, the question nagged away at the narrative. Taylor’s voracious appetite for presents started at the age of eleven—when, on the last day of shooting National Velvet, MGM gave her a horse.
One can imagine the young Taylor in the stable, staring at the horse, and sighing: “It’s good, but . . . but I can’t wear this horse on my head, at a ball. I think I’m going to go on Swap Shop and see if I can trade it in for a massive crown, instead.”
As Taylor got older, men flocked around her and gave her jewelry as if her pheromones activated their credit cards.
“Jewelry was almost like foreplay for her,” her dealer at Bulgari said. We saw the tiara that her third husband, Mike Todd, gave her—an item that had previously been the province of royalty—presented as the couple were getting ready for a party.
“Well, I had to thank him,” Taylor is reported as saying. “Needless to say, we were late for the party.”
“She was always grateful for a gift,” interviewee Liza Minnelli reported, gleefully—stopping just short of doing the “pokey finger” hand gesture for having sex in her eagerness to convey what had happened.
For Taylor, the link between sex and jewelry was ever-present. She never wanted merely the most expensive jewels—she wanted ones with infamy, too. Jewels with inference. By the time Taylor was with Burton—during the period they were racketing around Europe in a private jet called the Elizabeth, and the Pope accused them of “erotic vagrancy”—her jewelry had a heavy, positively carnal tone.
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