Russell T Davies takes on Thorpe
Former ‘Doctor Who’ supremo Russell Tdavies talks to Ben Lawrence about his new BBC One dramatisation of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal
Russell Tdavies is talking about his memories of the Jeremy Thorpe trial in the late Seventies. “As a young gay boy growing up, it was one of the strangest ways to hear about homosexuality. It didn’t seem connected to my life – it felt like arcane old men in Westminster.
“But I also remember how sad the story seemed, and that lingered.”
Now Davies, the creator of groundbreaking C4 drama Queer as
Folk (1999) and the man responsible for the triumphant return of Doctor
Who in 2005, has written a new three-part drama about the Thorpe case. A Very English Scandal (based on the book by John Preston), details the relationship between the Liberal politician (played by Hugh Grant) and the much younger Norman Scott (Ben Whishaw) in the early Sixties.
As the closeted Thorpe’s political star started to rise several years later, so the fragile Scott became more and more of an inconvenience and Thorpe decided he needed to be silenced. The shooting of Scott’s dog by a hired gunman during a possible attempt on his life brought the affair into the open. As he and three others went on trial for conspiracy to murder in 1979, the old Etonian dandy lost his parliamentary seat. He was acquitted, but it was the end of his political career; he died in 2014 having suffered from Parkinson’s disease for nearly three decades.
What’s striking is just how sympathetic Grant’s portrayal of Thorpe is. “I don’t want anyone to think that we’re attacking Thorpe,” says Davies over lunch at Bafta. “His political life came to a halt and politics was his life … it’s sad that people under the age of 45 haven’t heard of him. He had a fine mind and he was a great loss to politics.”
Nevertheless, Davies wanted to extend a similar compassion to Scott, who is still alive and proved crucial to his research; Davies believes he has “been on trial for the past 40 years” too. “I feel that he is a gay man whose history has been written by straight men. These men [Scott and Thorpe] hold no mystery for me. I look at them and think ‘I understand what you’ve been through. I know that’.” (It has to be said that since our interview, Scott has shown displeasure at the drama. In a tabloid interview, he criticised it for portraying him “as a mincing little gay person”.)
Ironically, Thorpe was instrumental in the passing of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which legalised sexual relationships between gay men over the age of 21. Davies says it is wrong to use the word closeted when referring to him because he grew up in an age when homosexuality was illegal. Does he think that, had he been born a few decades later, Thorpe would have been out and proud? “He was a cultured man with big horizons. I’d like to think that if he was 20 years younger, he could have had the gayest, happiest life, and of course therein lies the sadness.”
That said, recent events suggest that coming out as a politician isn’t always simple. “It is absurd, but the closet still exists. The first time I talked about this [A Very English Scandal] was the day that Keith Vaz had been exposed as sleeping with rent boys and pretending he was a washing-machine salesman. You couldn’t make that up. I am a good writer of fiction, but the script would have been thrown out.”
Exploring the dark underbelly of the establishment, this latest drama has made Davies think about power politics, he says. “If you think #Metoo is a turning point, think again. We have barely touched the surface of what men do at work. We have only really talked about sexual advances – we haven’t talked about anger and violence.”
Davies is 55, funny, warm and with an extraordinary voice that sometimes booms – his Swansea roots still very much in evidence – and more often lowers to a gentle, whisper. He has become known above all as Britain’s leading “gay writer” though I wonder if he minds being seen as a spokesman. “Not at all. We are on the front line and I love being a gay person in that respect because our lives are political.”
When Queer as Folk appeared at the end of the Nineties, Davies found himself attacked from all quarters. There was the tabloid vituperation, of course, which stemmed from the fact that a 15-year-old boy had his virginity taken by an older man in the first episode. But there was also fury from the gay press who wanted to know why Aids hadn’t been addressed and why condoms weren’t being shown. “That first press conference made me tough for life,” he says.
When the writer Frank Cottrell Boyce was once asked what Davies’s greatest contribution to TV drama was, he replied: “saving it from extinction”. Certainly, in the Nineties, he reinvigorated children’s drama with such hits as Century Falls and Dark Season (starring a very young Kate Winslet). Another moribund prospect, Doctor Who, was refreshed to even more dazzling effect and Davies, perhaps too modest to take much of the credit himself, talks about it in nevertheless hyperbolic terms.
“People have tried to copy it and they can match the budget and they can match the effects and they can match the cast, but they can’t match its intelligence. It is the most intelligent show you will ever write for.”
He would never return, describing himself as a happy viewer and excited about the imminent tenure of his friend Chris Chibnall as its new showrunner. But despite his stature, Davies expresses concern that he’s out of step with today’s TV’S landscape. “I do worry about my career because I don’t do crime thrillers,” he says. “I do social life and I do character studies. I sometimes think: ‘Am I going out on a limb here?’”
Following a period working in America, Davies recently returned to Manchester where he lives with his husband Andrew Smith, who is suffering from brain cancer.
“It returned last September, so the fight is on again. He is OK, but it is a dogged and persistent disease. He can walk and talk so he is all right, and I am very much aware that I get paid a nice wage from writing for television. You sit in those cancer hospitals and people have children clinging to their legs and have just been told they have to have six months off work and they can’t afford to.”
At the moment, Davies is working on a new BBC drama which he can’t talk about, and has vague ambitions to adapt Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. “I love the fact that it’s a mess. I would love to do something radically different to it. The old grandfather is basically renting out Little Nell to Quilp but, of course, Dickens couldn’t write about that openly.” The Old Curiosity Shop as reimagined by Russell T Davies – shocking, socially aware and above all, exciting. TV commissioners, please take note.
A Very English Scandal begins on Sunday on BBC One at 9pm