Russell Davies: The PlanetOut Interview
by Katherine Bell
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It's after midnight in Manchester, and the strip of gay clubs outside
Russell Davies's flat looks like a scene from his smash hit British TV
series Queer As Folk. Davies is buzzing with energy, but he's
inside on the phone with PlanetOut, talking about his provocative show
and how much he loves a little controversy.
PlanetOut: To start at the very beginning, how did you first come
up with the idea for Queer As Folk?
Russell Davies: I'd been for years writing soaps and dramas and
always putting gay characters in. They
were always the subplots because it was prime time stuff. And Channel
Four -- the job of Channel Four is to make
stuff that's a bit different, that's not so mainstream -- the deputy
head of drama there, who I'd known for
a few years, just pointed out the obvious. She actually said, "That's
what you write best, and so that's
what you should be doing, and you should put it center stage. And if you
want to write something, we'd
like to see it." So off I went.
PlanetOut: Did you anticipate such an uproar when the series first
aired in the U.K.?
RD: I anticipated a fuss, but actually no, I had no idea it would
reach the ridiculous proportions that it
went to. I remember the day after it went out reading the reviews in the
newspapers. I get The Guardian
every morning, which is quite a big sort of leftwing broadsheet
newspaper, and I turned to the television
review and it wasn't reviewed, they reviewed some documentary on the
other side. I thought, oh that's a
pisser, and then I thought, oh well never mind. And then my agent phoned
up, going "Oh my god, Oh my god,
have you seen The Guardian"? I said, "Yes, it's disgusting, they
haven't printed anything." And she said "No, no,
no, you're looking at the wrong bit. It's in the news paper, not the
media bit. The whole of page three, with photos, reviews, analysis,
comments."
The news section, which was
bizarre. And when you saw that, you just thought, Oh my God, this is
going to go mad. And then it just never
stopped. You know, after the first two weeks you think, Oh it'll die
down a bit now. And then in episode
three the sponsors pulled out. So that made the newspapers again because
that's never happened on a drama
before. So it just never stopped. It went on and on and on.
PlanetOut: Who pulled out?
RD: Becks beer. The homophobic bastards. And you can quote me on
that. [Laughs.] Their official apology
was that they were "rearranging their network investments." What a load
of rubbish.
PlanetOut: What surprised you most about people's reactions?
RD: I suppose the amount of people who'd seen it. That was odd.
I've written stuff for the mainstream
primetime channels that's got 11 million viewers, and you'd think no one
had ever seen it. ... And then
you do something like Queer As Folk which only got three million
viewers, but you'd think everyone had
seen it. Taxi drivers go, "Oh I've seen that, bloody disgusting," blah
blah blah. ... So that was strange. I
wasn't used to that. I was used to things going out to a great massive
depressing silence [laughs].
PlanetOut: The characters broke a lot of laws, but everyone
fixated on the age of consent. Did you expect
that?
RD: Oh yes. It wasn't that I wanted it, but I expected it,
absolutely. Of course that was going to happen.
Because most political discussions and conversations that you have are
just so stupid. You
end up having very, very simple conversations about morality and
behavior, because when people are
discussing the law, they talk as though people are legal and actually
follow the law in their hearts,
which of course they don't do. Otherwise we wouldn't have laws. That's
also a television thing, that we're
so saturated with bog standard morality from 8 in the morning until
midnight on television. Television is
the most moral world. It's like Disney, the villains are vanquished and
the good prosper, and it's very,
very simple stuff. Even adult television is children's television. So
try and do something a bit
different, a bit closer to real life, and people sit up going, that's
wrong!, that's wrong! People with
small minds.
PlanetOut: A lot of reviewers complained that the character of
Stuart was totally unlikable, which
surprised me, because first of all I didn't think that was entirely
true. I thought he was much more
complicated than that. And also, I thought that was one of the best
things about the series, that all of
the characters were very complex and did surprising, not always very
nice things.
RD: Yes, a bit more like life, really, instead of television.
PlanetOut: Were there any characters you disliked when you were
writing about them?
RD: No, I loved them all, and you have to. I think the only way
to write well is to love your characters,
and to love them to the extent that you can see and understand their
worst faults and not apologize for
them. That is when you're writing well. It's far more subtle. But I
think Vince does some far worse
things. Stuart is honest; Vince tends to lie a bit more. Nathan does
some atrocious things
because he's young and childish, which is purely part of being young and
childish. But because Stuart does
those things and smiles, he gets the attention drawn to him. ...
You know, when you're sitting inventing a
character, at the top of your brain, the first most important thing you
are not thinking is "likable."
It's such a dull and irrelevant and fictional thing. ... It's just
completely false and facile to look for sympathy all the time.
Another thing I think threw people is that the writing of soap opera has
infected an awful lot of
television. I love soap opera, in its place. I worked on soap operas for
years. But the entire nature of
soap operas is that people 100 percent of the time explain themselves.
They literally sit down at the
kitchen table and they say, "I am cross. I am cross because of this,
because my childhood was this, because
I got divorced last year, because it's my period." Blah blah blah. And
actually that was one thing I went
right away from in Queer As Folk, which I'd never done before.
Those characters never explained
themselves.
Normally, when you get a bit of a bastard like Stuart, he will sit down
in episode five and
say "Oh, I've had a dreadful childhood and I just can't express love,"
and all that rubbish that people say
in soap operas, which is purely to get the audience's sympathy. And I
refused to do that. I absolutely
refused to give you those simple key scenes that say, this is what's
going on, this is what he's thinking.
Similarly, in many a drama Vince would break down in episode five and
get drunk with his mother and say,
"I'm so in love with Stuart. I love him, I love him, I love him." And he
never, ever does. It's obvious what's
going on, because I let the audience do all the work. So that lack of
explanation caused the two extremes,
I think. It caused people to run around being scared and overreacting
because they weren't being given
explanations. So they sat there going, "this character's horrible." And
at the same time, it actually caused
the best effect, which is that the audience did all the work. I think
they felt like they were ahead of
the characters. They thought they were cleverer than Vince because they
could see what Vince was thinking.
He didn't tell them, but they knew. And equally, you could work out for
yourself what was going on in
Stuart's head instead of being told it, and I think that made people
feel more involved. I think that's the
primary reason it worked as a drama, never mind the gay or straight.
PlanetOut: I know that some gay rights activists inevitably
accused you of perpetuating negative gay
stereotypes.
RD: Yeah, they calmed down after a while.
PlanetOut: How did you respond to that?
RD: I'm actually in my flat at the moment, which is like 20 yards
from Canal Street. I can see Canal
Street from here, and it is crawling with men who are out for sex
tonight. And gay politicians and
spokespeople are in some kind of terrified denial that those people
exist. And what's more, if they do
acknowledge that they exist, they, the gay spokesmen, slam down this
massive moral straight judgement on
them, saying, "Wrong! You're wrong!" I could lean out my window going,
"Go home! You're wrong! Stop looking
for sex! Stop looking for a boyfriend! Stop it at once! Go home and read
a book!" What sort of moral
judgement is that? Where do these people get their values from? How
connected are they to real life? Not
at all. And, the marvelous thing about Queer As Folk is that most
of the people watching it just ignored
them and thought, "Oh shut up. Don't be so stupid." Which was fab.
PlanetOut: Did you have any trouble keeping your story lines
intact, or was Channel Four completely
supportive?
RD: Completely supportive from day one. We did loads and loads of
work on the script, but that was just
normal drama rewrites. The work we did was to make the characters
stronger and better and the stories
more interesting, which didn't involve the sex scenes at all actually.
They were fine -- they were never,
ever questioned. So, fantastic support.
PlanetOut: You're involved in the U.S. version of Queer As
Folk, right?
RD: Well, minimally involved. They're filming episode five now --
I haven't even read it.
PlanetOut: Tell me about your role.
RD: Well, I'm down as a consultant, but really that means about
three phone calls and three e-mails.
That's exactly the way it should be, actually. ... I think the best way
to make it work is to sit back and
let them make their own mistakes and their own successes. ... In the end
we don't know what made it work.
If we knew what made it work we would keep that formula going for the
rest of our lives and be
millionaires. ... I don't think anyone sets out to make
a bad television program, but most of them are bad. Because circumstance
and time and money and talent
just count against you in the end. I couldn't actually give you one
solid reason why it worked. It's just
luck.
PlanetOut: How close is the series going to be to the U.K.
version?
RD: It starts out quite close. But the thing is, it's 22 hours
long. And we only ever edited ten episodes.
That's series one and two. So from the very start it's a different
series because it's designed to run and
run. After the first season they're hoping there'll be a second, third,
fourth, fifth. So it's got all
those elements built in, all those subplots and surrounding characters
ready to become big stories,
whereas I was never interested in that. So the first two hours you'll
absolutely recognize. They follow
the story very closely to the original. I mean, they've even got a black
Jeep.
PlanetOut: What concessions needed to be made for the American
audience? I know that Nathan's age was
raised [from 15] to 17. Were there other things that needed to be
adjusted for an American sensibility?
RD: No. I mean, you go to gay clubs and pubs in Manchester and
then you go to Sydney, or New York, or Los
Angeles, and they're exactly the same. That's why I think it will work,
because in Western or Westernized
society it is the same world, it's the same pubs and clubs. Other than
that, the stories are about family.
That's the same everywhere in the world. So the essential stuff doesn't
need to be changed at all. Just
the language, obviously, different patterns of talking, but that's all.
I can't define what the difference
is between American and British culture, and neither should I really.
That's why again I shouldn1t be part
of the American one. It should be completely American.
PlanetOut: The U.S. writers made a decision to deal more overtly
with HIV and AIDS. Do you know if it's
going to be more political all around?
RD: No from what I've read it's not more political, not at all. I
mean, the thing is, when you're writing
about gay characters at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it's
political full-stop. Queer As Folk
became political in many senses in this country without any politics in
the script because that's the
nature of our lives. We are political people just by existing. And I
don't think they wanted to involve
AIDS as politics. I think they thought it was an essential story that
needed telling. So, good for them.
PlanetOut: I just saw a story yesterday that some companies, even
companies that usually advertise to the
gay market like Versace and Abercrombie & Fitch, are refusing product
placements on the show.
RD: It's fascinating, isn't it? During the advert breaks in this
country, you could see people smelling
the pink pound. The adverts were fantastic, they were the big expensive
adverts. The biggest advertising
agency recently released a list of its top ten programs for the most
expensive ads, the A1 males, the
people with money, and Queer As Folk was in that top-ten list. It
was an advertiser's dream -- you'd watch
it and the adverts would be the most expensive cars, the most expensive
beers, the great big advertisers
throwing their money in. So in those terms it was fine, absolutely fine.
PlanetOut: What would you like to see on TV?
RD: Oh, more stuff of mine [laughs]. See, I'm perfectly happy
watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I
think that's one of the best programs on planet Earth. Literally, it's
one of the best dramas. We've got
Big Brother over here at the moment. I sit and watch Big
Brother thinking, you could not write drama this
good. Watching real people is absolutely brilliant.
PlanetOut: Big Brother in this country is so boring. They
picked the most boring people.
RD: I've heard that actually. It took off here. It's Channel
Four's highest rating for about ten years. It's
astonishing. They just got lucky with the people they chose. They're
choosing the winner this Friday and I
can't wait. And one of the three people left is a lesbian. I keep
phoning for her every ten minutes.
PlanetOut: She's the one who used to be a nun, right?
RD: Yeah, can you imagine that? How modern is that? A lesbian
ex-nun could win that program. That would be
the most brilliant thing in the world. Sadly I think the white straight
boy is going to win, but there we
go. That's why I keep phoning every ten minutes.
PlanetOut: What else do you watch regularly?
RD: I actually watch anything. I watch all the major soap operas.
I do love soap opera. I couldn't work on
a soap opera, but I do love watching them.
PlanetOut: Which kind, the British ones, the Australian ones, or
the American ones?
RD: Oh, the British ones. We don't really get many American ones
over here. We only get one in fact, Days
of Our Lives. I do watch the Australian ones. I just watch those as
wallpaper though. I absolutely love
the British ones. I love Coronation Street with all my heart.
PlanetOut: I've always been fascinated by the correlation between
class and country in terms of soap
operas. In Britain, all the successful ones have been working class. In
Australia, they're suburban middle
class. And here, they're these fabulously wealthy ridiculous people.
RD: I think about that as well. It's absolutely fascinating. I
don't think you could launch a middle/upper
class soap opera in this country. People have tried and I swear it would
fail.
PlanetOut: Why do you think that is?
RD: I think it's because when you're middle class and when you're
upper class, you still essentially feel
working class. Because what we mean by the very simple term "working
class" is worried about money, not
enough time, worried about your job, stress. And I think everyone feels
that. But working class just sort
of exaggerates it in the way that television needs to exaggerate stuff,
like losing your job is much more
important, and not having enough money and getting money is much more
difficult. And so it just is a
slight exaggeration of the stuff that everyone feels. If a middle-class
character in his 20s lost his
job, you'd think, well he'll be fine. Whereas you can make believe in a
working-class soap opera that
that's a real problem. So it's just a heightened form of drama.
And there's
a great nostalgic pride and passion for the working class. ... Everyone
wants to be
working class. It's quite strange, but that's the way of Britain
somehow, and I sort of understand it. So
that's why we love working-class dramas.
PlanetOut: In this country people watch them to escape, to watch
something that in no way resembles their
lives. It's completely the opposite.
RD: It's said, I don't know if this is a great big cliche, that
American society is more aspirational.
That you can watch them sitting in South Fork and say, "I could have
that. I could be that rich if I work
hard and get the right job." Which is not quite the way of thinking in
this country. Here, they'd watch it
and think, that'll never be me. I don't know if that's a cliche but it
sort of makes sense.
PlanetOut: Tell me what you're working on now.
RD: Now I'm working on two things at once. I'm working on a
six-hour series for ITV, which is the big
commercial channel here, which is called Bob and Rose, which is
about a gay man who falls in love with a
woman. After doing something so completely gay as Queer As Folk,
I actually want to push it on a bit now,
a bit further, saying actually anyone can sleep with anyone. Knock down
the barriers completely. You know,
gay, straight, fuck it. It's the 21st century now. Let's move on a bit.
And it's quite nice to do
that with two very old-fashioned characters. They're two very ordinary
people who would not think of
themselves as cutting-edge at all, and they find themselves breaking all
the rules just by falling in
love. Any love story needs a problem, and that's their problem.
There's that, which won't be on until next
autumn. The other one -- don't laugh now -- is a four-hour series for
Channel Four which is called
The Second Coming, about the return to Earth of the Son of God.
Seriously. It's a serious drama
about confronting modern-day people with the notion that God is real. I
mean, I'm an atheist, but imagine
if you suddenly had to wake up one day ... and say, "It's real. Every
word of the Bible is true." Oh my God. Which is fascinating
actually. It's an epic.
PlanetOut: Do you think it's going to be controversial, like
The Last Temptation of Christ?
RD: Sadly, yes. People just love making a fuss. There's been a
whole page about it and me in the Sunday
Express already. It's not on until next autumn; we don't start
filming until March. And people are making
a fuss already. The producer had to go on BBC Radio to defend the fact
that we're making it. We'll have to
fight off a lot of stupid talk, and it'll be very boring. But what I
want to do is get people talking. I
think you can know people all your life and not know what their religion
is. Because, certainly Western
society, we're just embarrassed talking about it. ... So I would love
husbands and
wives to sit and watch this and turn to each other and say, "What do you
believe in?" And best friends
who've never asked to say, "Do you believe in God?" That would be
brilliant. That's not controversial. That's fascinating. That would be
lovely, if we can stir up just a bit of talk about something. It would
be fab.
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