SCREEN QUEENS
The godfather of gay storytelling on screen, Russell T Davies leads our Media & Broadcast list. Here, Davies’ former mentee, writer and performer Amrou Al-Kadhi joins him in conversation…
“To answer people who have been offended by something is literally tedious”
Russell
For LGBTQ+ representation on our TV screens, ’90s drama Queer As Folk
was seminal, a turning point that forever changed how gay characters were portrayed to mainstream audiences. No longer were we sexless creatures played for laughs, or one-dimensional, tormented teens. In Russell T Davies’ breakthrough series, gay relationships were not just unashamedly sexual, but also unapologetically authentic, with characterisation that was complex and layered. The show had a similar impact across the pond, when its American adaptation went on to enjoy a five-season run, reinvigorating gay drama as it did so.
It’s no exaggeration to say that without Queer As Folk, there would be no Skins, Looking, Euphoria and numerous other shows that put sexuality front and centre of storytelling. Writer Russell T Davies went on to be part of the team that relaunched Dr Who in the 21st century, served us Cucumber, dystopian drama in Years and Years, and in 2021 brings the Aids crisis to Channel 4 with the gripping It’s a Sin.
Joining him on our list of big-hitters in the world of media and broadcasting is performer and writer Amrou Al-Kadhi, who came under Russell’s tutelage as part of BFI Flare’s mentor programme. Amrou’s memoir, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey From Shame to Pride and Everything In Between, was published by HarperCollins in the UK and the US, and won the Polari First Book Prize and the Somerset Maugham award, and is being adapted for television by NBC Universal.
As a screenwriter, Amrou co-wrote the final episode of Apple TV+’s Little America, which The Hollywood Reporter raved about, calling it “the show’s pinnacle”. Their next project, a contemporary queer take on Romeo & Juliet,
immersed in the warring factions of the gay community during Pride, is in development with Film4.
Attitude joined mentor Russell and his mentee Amrou to share their notes on writing for the screen, queer representation and when it’s right not to write a story.
What television shows impacted you most when you were younger?
Russell: I was lucky, because when I was 13, 14, I Claudius was hitting BBC2, and Pennies From Heaven by Dennis Potter, starring Bob Hoskins and Gemma Craven. And I feel that was life-changing. There was a fuss in the newspaper, because there was a scene in which Gemma’s character lipsticked her nipples to revive a dead marriage, and in order to express her sexuality, when she was actually very repressed and scared. Literally, the tabloids were howling and screaming, saying, “This is filth, it should be taken off air.” It was the most sad, and beautiful, and brilliant scene you will ever see. That was a great big moment for me, realising not just what drama is on television, but the part that the press play in shaping everyone’s opinion.
Did you ever get a sense that Channel 4 was more interested in, or aware of, the controversy that Queer As Folk would bring, or did you feel they were genuinely interested in representation and putting these gay characters on screen?
R: Oh, representation, absolutely. They didn’t really pay that much attention, they shunted it to 10:30pm at night. We weren’t particularly liked by the channel. Then it was sold to America, and the channel cocked up the deal on a vast scale, because they did not know what they had. We were like the noisy brats in the flat next door, really. But, to answer the question, no one does controversy for controversy’s sake. Do you know how boring it is to answer people who have been offended by something? It’s literally tedious. No one brings that upon themselves.
Amrou: If I responded to all my controversy… I have whole DMs on my phone in one big complaint box. I mean, I don’t mind if, for instance, a Muslim person comes up to me and says, “I actually was a little bit offended by your Song to Allah,” in a way that’s interesting to me, but then there’s the controversy [of] thousands of people complaining about Black Lives Matter on Britain’s Got Talent. The most controversial thing that I get is, “Why do I pay my taxes to have you on TV?”. Which is, like, you’re not even paying attention to the content.
If the content is provocative, and Queer As Folk does blur the line on consent, and asks questions in a good, controversial way… I’m not just saying this because I’m talking to Russell, but the first queer representation that I saw on TV that got me very excited — and terrified as well — was Queer As Folk. I think I was 12 at the time. It was very much one of those ‘watch at 1 per cent volume, 1mm from the TV’ while my Muslim parents were upstairs sleeping. It was very much [a case] of looking at the timetable, and figuring out what time the repeat was on.
R: And the word queer made sense to you, there it was…
A: No, it didn’t make sense to me, I thought it was, like, weirdos. I just knew it was about gay men. My parents turned the TV off for the rimming scene. But that opening scene, with Nathan going out onto the street, looking around, it was kind of reflected in just me watching the TV — I felt like him in that moment; there’s this big, queer world to discover, and you’re going to have so much fun and so much sex. It was terrifying, and a lot of the dialogue I couldn’t catch, just because I was listening to it so quietly. But it was great.
And then the next thing was Grey’s Anatomy. What [writer] Shonda Rhimes did is she treated the characters a little bit like superheroes, and they were very emotional, and it was quite heightened in a way that was cathartic, especially in a household that wasn’t talking about anything. Grey’s Anatomy was almost whorish, emotionally. Each of them had so much drama happen to them, every
episode. It was quite close to a soap in that way, though. But that was a real way for me to feel, watching Meredith Grey suffering catastrophically. I engaged with the cathartic nature of TV, which let me access my emotions – even with families crying on X-Factor, which you don’t ever get to see with British repressed people – suddenly all these people crying about their mothers watching.
R: I don’t think a lot of British people quite realise that American television doesn’t have evening soap operas; they have afternoon soap operas, which are just daft, which are full of murderous twists. The evening domestic soap doesn’t exist out there. So what you see happening in Grey’s Anatomy, and all those long-running shows are American writers exploring falling in love, birth, marriage and death, that’s what soap operas are; birth, marriage and…
A: Tragedy. And also, just the sense of elevation, and aspiration, and actually just going into a different world. I haven’t seen as much social realism in some big American broadcast shows.
R: That’s the fundamental difference between American and British; American is the superheroes, aspirational, it’s all the father mythology. Basically, all of America is in love with its father – look at The Lion King, or the president, or whatever, it’s your father figure. And I think Britain is the mother figure, it’s much more related to “Clean your mugs and make your bed, and get on with it.” Our mythologies are made of female matriarchs.
Going back a step to how controversy can promote a TV show, and the media is now a valuable tool to the art that you create, do you ever sit down and think, what story am I going to write? Or is it, what do people want to see? Is it hard to separate the two sometimes?
A: When I was writing a column for the Independent for a couple of years, I actually ended up not really enjoying that in the end, because when you have to distil a viewpoint to 600 words every two weeks, it feeds culture wars, [in] the way that some newspapers will write headlines that belie the truth, using them for click bait. I am now much more invested in writing my drag show, or TV shows that I’m working on. The media is now so cultural-centred – you’re either on this side, or this side, and everything’s a shouting match. And as someone who often has to go on TV to justify my identity, you end up just shouting back, and actually, I like to think I’m quite a fun person, but I never get to do that when I’m writing a column, because I’m not going to have anything funny to say about a terrorist attack.
In terms of TV, Russell, when you come to writing a drama like Years and Years, or It’s a Sin, how do you decide that that’s the right idea to pitch and to proceed with creating, because you must have hundreds?
R: You’ve got to trust yourself. Over the years, you learn to trust your voice. And that’s an ongoing process, it never stops. Something like Years And Years, as the world got madder, with Donald Trump being elected, that demanded that was written then.
Do you remember the first time you saw ‘yourself ’ reflected back at you on the screen?
R: I suppose it’s probably why I wrote Queer As Folk. The soaps were ahead of the game there, the gay characters in the ’90s started to appear, like Tony and Simon in EastEnders. But I didn’t like those characters. I’m glad they existed, but it was genuinely part of the reason why I wrote Queer As Folk. I do very often sift through my own head, trying to right wrongs, even if I’m the only person who can see the wrongs. Do you think that, Amrou?
It’s a big part of writing, I think, righting wrongs, I love that.
A: Yeah. I was coming to writing from the position of starting out as a performer, where I was only being given 9/11 reenactment roles. There was one audition where it said on the brief, ‘An Arab man in a dress’. So, I came in full drag and then the casting director, who couldn’t stop laughing, was, like, “No, it’s a cold-blooded terrorist who puts on a burka to disguise the bombs.” And I was in full drag, with my heels clacking against the floor, and had to do improv to that. But improv, like, “Get out, bitches!”. It was a nightmare.
On the subject of representation and how gay people on screen have been written, do you feel that if the character doesn’t represent a viewer’s life, they can’t see past that?
R: Well, because we’re a minority we’re stuck in this niche of wanting representation, and then not recognising representation. If you’re a straight couple, you know that Romeo and Juliet doesn’t represent you, or that Catherine and Heathcliff don’t represent you, it doesn’t occur to them; it’s a fiction. The reverse is also true. And frankly, my writing is so accurate, I nail gay men. When I started watching Cucumber with the man that Stuart was based on, he sat there rolling his eyes saying what a piece of rubbish it was, and he’d never seen gay men act like this in his life. The fact that he did that in front of me shows you what kind of man he was, how much like Stuart he was.
I’ve given people the same name on screen, and they haven’t recognised themselves. Sometimes they have recognised themselves, and it’s got very awkward. I even lost a friend over it. The opening episode of Cucumber, where they have this huge row over their sex life, and then they get someone in for a threesome, and the man ends up walking barefoot to go and get a policeman, that literally happened to a friend of mine, and he did turn up at my house the day after, and our friendship was then wrecked, because I think I’d used everything. I thought, tough shit, good story.
A: I actually had a gay Muslim guy say to me after a show, “I don’t feel like that represented the panoply of queer Muslim experience.” And he was quite mad about it actually, and I was like, oh, God, and I felt really bad. I was really angry at myself for a while, and then I did think, well, I was just as specific as possible to my experience here, and that’s all I can do. And the fact that you didn’t feel represented is because there needs to be more. But definitely, whenever a queer show comes out, I do always feel quite sorry for the writer, because you see all of queer Twitter going, “No, no, what about this, what about this?” And, “There’s not this person in there.” And I just think, oh, God.
R: I mean, you have to reach a point where you need to tell people, “Learn to read.” When that man comes up to you and says, “You don’t represent the panoply of Arabic experience,” he needs to be told, “Learn to read.” That’s not what art does, that’s not what culture does, that’s not what a story does.
A: I agree that that was a bit unfortunate, but what I do think is worrying at the moment — my friend said it — [is that] there’s this sort of puritanical ritualism that some people have when they watch or read something. Something racist will happen in the show, because it’s honest to maybe what happened, and they go, “The writer must be a racist.”
Have you experienced any conflicts in your writers’ rooms?
R: I think one of the most interesting writers’ rooms at the moment is Emmerdale, where they’re doing a story about someone aborting a Down’s syndrome child. I bet that writers’ room’s heated. That’s a genuinely difficult conversation to have. I’m not affected by it,
“I engaged with the cathartic nature of TV, which let me access my emotions”
Amrou
I don’t want them to try and mansplain to them what the problem is to a woman in that situation, but I think it’s fascinating. That’s writers pushing things right to the edge, a very brave and difficult story.
A: When I was in Hollyoaks, I was part of the far-right storyline, where some white characters get radicalized against some Muslim, and I was the only person of colour in the room. And you realise as well, how quickly a story gets made, and if you don’t shout, something bad might happen on screen that is not conducive to good representation.
R: I think we’re in a very interesting world. Amrou and I talked about how we’d love to put trans stories on screen, we’d love to put stories of all sorts of different sexualities on screen, all sorts of gender, nationalities, yet we are entering a world in which you will be told by that enormous Twitter voice, “You can’t write that because you’re not trans.”
So one’s instinct is to be inclusive, and to be diverse, and to include more of these stories, but then there’s a very powerful opposite instinct telling us not to do that. I turned down two big jobs this year, one was a very good trans story, and I said, “I’m
“Right now, I’d be torn to pieces if I wrote a black story” Russell
not a trans person, a trans person’s got to write that.” And one was an adaptation of a great novel, it was a black novel, and I said, “No, right now, I’d be torn to pieces if I wrote a black story.” I said the entire debate about the show would be about how I’m a white man writing a black story. A: Yeah. I do think that if there is a trans screenwriter out there, and they have had so few opportunities as it is, they probably would be able to add a level of real authenticity to this story. [But also] in Years and Years, there’s a trans character, but there’s no problem with it at all. I guess it would be if it’s a really authorial piece. I don’t know, it’s such a tricky subject.
Russell, what’s the best piece of advice you can give to an aspiring writer?
R: Simply to start. Start your script, and then finish your script. Most people don’t start the script, even more people don’t finish the script. You can complain about the state of television all you like, nothing’s going to happen until you’ve got a script that shows a different world, so get on with it.
It’s a Sin is on Channel 4 in January