Press Archive > Magazine Article > Attitude - January

Queer Street 
Channel 4's new soap Queer As Folk has been soliciting shrieks of outrage from model England. And it hasn't even aired yet. Paul Flynn talks to the show's stars and creators and asks...

'What the folk is going on?' 


Tonight there is something of a hoo-ha on Canal Street, central drag of Manchester's gay village. It's sloshing with rain but a rosy glow is cast over proceedings by the presence of a real, live TV crew who, for the following twelve hours, will make this their home. Location filming is in full flight for Queer As Folk, Channel 4's new 8-part gay drama series. Mini-olympic torches have been ignited to light the thoroughfare. Industrial lights, hung from old cotton warehouses, add an extra layer of gloss for to the whole caboodle. It is all as light as a Brazilian street carnival, which, for a piss-soaked Manchester Monday midnight, is no mean feat. Nameless, wet people carrying clipboards and wearing puffa jackets shout "Shooting!" and "Cut!" from time to time, and into shoot spring our three main characters: Vince, Stuart and Nathan. It all looks swell, peering from behind the monitor that is the director's, the producer's and any old passer-bye’s key to what is going on. 
"What are they doing?" inquires a clearly sozzled and partially clad passer-by, propping up her similarly inappropriately dressed pal. 
Er, making a TV programme. 
"No way! No way!" 
It's turning into a sequence from a vanilla song. 
"We can be extras. Come on, let's have a word." 
Which they do, with a firm but polite Nicola Shindler, producer of Queer As Folk, who mutters something about being fine for extras, thanks all the same, and raising a cursory eyebrow. As well she might. 
The hoo-ha on Canal Street is nothing, it should be added, to the hoo-ha already underway at Daily Mail Towers as a direct result of Queer As Folk. With metronomic predictability, the moral guardians of middle England had declared themselves outraged by it a good six months ahead of it's actual screening. Their initial 'Ban this Filth!'-type flurry was provoked by the original titling of the show, Queer As F**k. Which might possibly have caused offence to the odd church wife in Bermondsey and was leaked to the press in the sensible pursuit of publicity well before an actual title had actually been decided upon. At one point it was to be called The Other End Of The Ballroom - said as an unfortunate joke the day of another press release and swiftly disguarded forthwith. At the eleventh hour it's still uncertain as to whether it'll go out as Folk or F**k. 
Somewhere between the hoo-ha from the Canal Street natives themselves and the hoo-ha from the press is hidden all that you really need to know for the time being about Queer As Folk. It is going to be talked about everywhere. The names Stuart, Vince and Nathan - and probably many of their supporting cast's besides - are about to enter into a convoluted dialogue with the nation. Love it, loathe it or let it ride right over your head. Everyone is going to have an opinion on it. 
Though everybody involved in the show is absolutely adamant that it's not an issue-based drama - it is a drama in which the characters happen to be gay - it inadvertently throws up approximately an issue-per-scene. Though these could be seen, in Daily Mail-speak, as controversial by their very nature, they are also the stuff of willful, meaty and arresting drama. 

'Issue' one, episode one: youth. Nathan, a 15-year-old boy played with sweet and increasing affection by Queer As Folk's young fey Charlie Hunnam, is fucked (-over) by 29-year-old Stuart, Queer As Folk's relentlessly unforgiving Lothario. He is dropped at school the next day by the merciless cad, having spent part of the night at the hospital in honor of the birth of his lesbian pal's baby. Seed provided, trusty old yogurt pot and teaspoon method, by Stuart (Stuart's seed is an 'issue' throughout). 'Issue' two, then, episodes one: lesbian mothering. Stuart, not shy in his wanton drug ingestion throughout the first three episodes, pops pills by way of celebration/commiseration. Which brings us neatly to 'issue' three, episodes one, two and three: narcotics. Before you have even got to the threesomes in council flats, heroin deaths, Brazilian bum lice, Peter Mandelson references and internet chit-chats with someone called 'Goodfuk' you have enough material to keep Richard Littlejohn foaming at the mouth with column inches well into the millennium. Wake up and smell the morning paper uproar. 
The grand triumph implicit at the heart of Queer As Folk is that none of the characters - or, indeed, one of the actors playing the characters - thinks of these things as issues. Just like real life. There's a wry and knowing feel to both Stuart and Vince, but they're offset by Nathan's incumbent and very quick education on his introduction to 'the gay world', such as it's represented here. Everyone in production is very wary of representing 'gay worlds'. Wary, in fact, of representing anything but the character's own drama and, for the most part, their pursuit is unsuccessful. But it's a recognizable world, nonetheless, and one that is inhabited largely by gay men and their temporarily impressed hangers-on. For forums of public decency like the Daily Mail it will undoubtedly be shocking and outrageous and offensive that this 'world' exists. For those who know it, it will be a perfunctory backdrop for a set of extremely familiar, if slightly exaggerated scenarios. It's a world that lends itself surprisingly well to a small-screen drama... 

Vince and, more particularly, Stuart are equivalent late-twenties' fuckabouts in the final flourishes of their extended youth. They manipulate their own drama by thinking with genitals first, heads second. There is lots and lots of sex in Queer As Folk. It's a testament to the power of writing that none of it seems remotely gratuitous; just plausible behavior from plausible characters. You know the type. A bit air-kissy, mobiles, sleep with everyone, tight tops, drive jeeps, think of dancing to Rollo remixes as a wild and serious endeavor into techno, never fall in love but are always 'seeing someone' (anyone). They don't inhabit the 'gay world' where people happen to sleep with other people of the same gender. They certainly don't inhabit the Daily Mail-friendly (or Daily Mail-tolerated), gentrified 'gay world' of Chris Smith and Stephen Twigg and their long-term lovers, planning a night out at the opera. They live in the gay world with capitals G, A and Y where everyone has bought into the trappings. Being gay is implicitly the most interesting thing about their lives. Which is kind of a scary issue in itself, if you care to dwell on it. They probably don't. 
Their creator, writer Russell T Davies, loves his characters. 
"I love my characters," he says, by way of confirmation, "I think they're fantastic." 
Does he fancy them? 
"Of course I do." 
Stuart is not scripted as a likable character. Sharp, but not likeable. Aidan Gillen, the instantly impressive Irish actor in charge of bringing this malevolent rogue to life, is enthused about playing him. "I only play parts that I enjoy. Generally they're not all good. I swapped roles for the stage and screen versions of Mojo and they are probably the two best roles in the play, but they're not good, if you know what I mean. Nothing is as black and white as that. That's when the writing is interesting." That's when acting, presumably, turns you on. Gillen took the call to audition for the part the minute he'd finished reading the script. 
Craig Kelly is playing Vince, Stuart's stalwart, less successful - in career and carnal pursuits: his lack of success in the latter is one of the most cheerily-handled and entertaining issues herein - best friend. He's unintimidated by the role, but you can't help noticing that he does a spot of shadow-boxing with the crew after stepping off set, having just smooched a new love interest on screen. It's a playful display of machismo but it's almost certainly, subconsciously there to reaffirm real-life boundaries. He is whole-heartedly sick of answering questions of the 'what's it like to play a gay character?' variety. Unsurprisingly, a crew from a London news network have just asked him nothing but variants of it. "You feel like saying," he says, not unreasonably, "that that's what I do. I'm an actor. Actors play parts." 
Charlie Hunnam is the actor likely to arouse most press interest. He's young. Already his image is being used for big, splash pictures to accompany pro-active debates on the age of consent in The Guardian. It's all a New World for him, but he's following the narrative thread of his character with gleeful ease. "Just because you're not familiar with all this [Canal Street, this particularly 'gay world'] doesn't mean you can't understand it." It's the same rebuttal that Kelly uses and, again, it rings true. If you're an actor, you play parts. An age-old argument that only disabled people can play disabled people became intrinsically disabled when Daniel Day Lewis took to his left foot. Look at the fuss around Michael Cashman and Eastenders. It's a different place and time. It's victim politics (no one understands us!). That Cashman has dined out on that ever since is his prerogative. Ultimately, he has proved himself to be more of a political voice than an actorly one. Watching three straight actors play three gay roles should not be unusual in 1999. It's too early to see rushes, but standing and observing at the side of a bedrizzled set at 12 midnight, they seem to be doing a more than adequate job. 

When Queer As Folk was at the commissioning stage - and it's unlikely that anyone will be thanking anyone for mentioning this - it was part of the knock-on of the This Life effect. The brief was only that the characters should all be gay, but there was a short conversation between Channel 4's Catriona McKenzie and Russell T Davies in which she suggested it might be interesting to script a drama about a gay flat share. Davies thought that the idea stank, "because I thought that if a group of gay men shared a flat together they would all be quite similar and, anyway, if you're going to do a flat share thing you might as well just do This Life and I didn't want to do that." Since This Life, everyone in TV drama, in unremitting jealousy, has gone a bit This Life. Even Hollyoaks is a bit This Life now. 
Russell T Davies tottered off and wrote Queer As Folk instead. The drama, you suspect, that he has always wanted, nay craved to write. The one that he has always wanted to see. Because, in terms of character at least, Queer As Folk is the story of his and his friend's lives. Just listen to how the first bud of the idea of Stuart and Vince's fictional relationship - the relationship that underpins the whole series - came to him: 
"My starting point was that couple that you find all the time. They're best friends and one of them is completely in love with the other one. They probably had some sort of sexual encounter years ago and one of them is dying for it to be repeated. I copped off with a couple in a club last November ('97) and thought, 'Oooh, marvelous! Threesome!', but I only fancied one of them. 
"They must have been used to this, because they were always copping off in threesomes. The one that I didn't like so much just sat there getting drunker at my table and eventually came out with it. He said 'Which one of us do you fancy?' and I said both of you - because you have to, don't you? - and eventually I got really pissed off with them, because they were both obviously mad. I mean they seriously preferred Eastenders to Coronation Street"... (The Eastenders bugbear finds its way into the Queer As Folk script, too. Davies could rile on the subject of Tony and Simon for three weeks without pausing for breath... "That was the point when I thought these people are not remotely amusing. Talking in my house about preferring Eastenders. I was thinking 'This is my house!' You're stupid, I'm not. I was so badly behaved, but anyways, he says 'Which one of us do you fancy?' again, so I said 'Him!!' and pointed to the nice one. It was brilliant to watch because I was driving the other one mad. After that I didn't have sex with either of them. I just shoved them both in the spare room, so there we are. You like Eastenders. I'll get to bed on my own." 
From this encounter came Queer As Folk. The best writing always being a form of self-reflective surgery. The Daily Mail, as yet, is not known to be in possession of the story. It isn't a press release. But there is no denying that sometimes there is something queerer than folk. And that's queer folk. Kind of. The hoo-ha that went that way.