Warning: spoilers for Cucumber (I know it’s 10 years old at this point, but you never know).
Russell T Davies is an easy person to admire. He’s a proud adopted Mancunian, an award-winning TV writer, and he introduced a new generation to Doctor Who.
Yet despite that admiration, when Metro called him to chat about the 10th anniversary of his lesser-known TV show Cucumber, I learned he’s not someone you should trust with a secret. Why?
Well, more than a decade ago, when the 62-year-old – who’s speaking about the show at the Scene Festival on 20 August inManchester– sat down to write episode one, he decided to end it with a threesome.
This awful orgy between a couple teetering on the edge of a break-up and a drunk (the trois in this calamitous ménage à trois) ends up involving several police officers and an arrest.
Needless to say, the whole thing is as sexy as a trip to the chiropodist for new orthopaedic sandals, but it makes for great telly.
There was just one problem – he sort of accidentally borrowed it from a friend and put it on TV.
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‘That happened word for word, to a friend of mine,’ Russell laughs. ‘That scene, including literally walking down the street barefoot to find the policeman and get them to his house.
‘I put all that on screen, I forgot to tell him. I actually kind of forgot that I’d taken it from real life, because I changed some things about it. He turned up at my house furious!’
It’s this big climactic blowout that kicks off the dramatic events of the 2015 series Cucumber, a show about two middle-aged gay men – Henry (Vincent Franklin) and Lance (Cyril Nri) – living in Manchester as they go through a messy break-up.
If you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry. You’re not alone, as Russell told me, ‘it wasn’t going for headlines’.
Still, while it may be the slightly unassuming middle child of Russell’s unofficial queer trilogy (as I have decided to name it) – Queer as Folk, Cucumber, and It’s a Sin – the show is quietly radical.
How so? Well, the series exists to explore a side of queerness rarely seen on TV or, as Russell put it, ‘with queer matters, we get discussions of sexuality, which often boil down into discussions about sex’.
To take it back to that threesome then, in Russell’s mind, Cucumber ‘isn’t about sex’.
‘It’s about a relationship completely falling apart because one member of that threesome has never communicated sexually what he wants in his entire adult life,’ he explains.
‘It’s a threesome that is the destruction of a couple, and it quite viciously sets out to do that from the very start.’
Has LGBTQ+ representation on TV become better or worse?
Russell shares his thoughts on representation on the small screen…
‘I think TV is not bad at the moment. In fact, sometimes you watch Coronation Street thinking one more gay person, and you overbalance, which is a very unusual feeling. But it is great to see, and there’s always new territory.
‘It’s great to see that young Oscar Branning swagger onto EastEnders, happily bisexual. I’ve been dying for that for a decade, for someone to walk in problem-free, saying, “Hello, I fancy men. I fancy women.”
‘That was a little revolution that happened last week. Indeed, these things are now becoming so commonplace that we don’t even celebrate them.
‘Nonetheless, I’ve got to say, you say that, and you can still sit through three hours of prime time without a single gay character cropping up. I always nag my fellow executives and writers about this, because we don’t have to be the centre of the story.
‘Obviously, not every story is a gay story. That’s completely fine, but you know, where’s the lesbian sister? Where’s the trans little brother?’
That viciousness then permeates the show, which manages to be a funny and thoughtful meditation on what it means to be gay when you’re past your prime.
‘That’s kind of my wheelhouse. I’m amazed I get away with it,’ Russell admits.
‘[Cucumber] is very critical of gay men, because that’s what I’m here for… straight people can write dramas where queer characters are nice and happy. I’m here to find their faults.’
If Russell’s goal was to depict queer characters as flawed, he succeeded.
You’d be hard pressed to see a more unvarnished depiction of gay men in TV history – unless you think hunting hairs on the shaft of your penis is glam – and few characters are more flawed than Henry and Lance.
On paper, the neurotic Henry is the more contemptible of the show’s leads. It’s Henry who breaks up with Lance after an engagement gone wrong and moves in with younger men.
Still, to Russell, it’s more ambiguous than that. ‘Everything that happens to Henry is his fault,’ he emphasises.
Yet when it comes to Lance’s ultimate fate – he’s killed by his lover, Daniel, during a horrifying moment of ‘gay panic’ – Russell is clear he sowed the seeds of his destruction.
Ignore the trolls
When I asked Russell what he thought of people online who ‘hate Henry’, he didn’t hold back…
‘I don’t particularly pay much attention to online opinions because they’re primitive. After all, they aren’t very nuanced. They make you want to put up a banner saying, “learn to read”.
‘People are very bad at reading dramas and learning anything. The people who post online are…This is why the entire world is sliding into the pit, because that’s becoming our primary form of communication.
‘Is that doing it any good whatsoever? Not at all.
‘So those people who say, “I hate Henry”, what a weird thing to be doing…
‘These comments are being typed up by virgins who have literally no experience of anything, ever, anywhere, and so that’s why their opinion is so extreme – because it’s so simple, because they’ve never had that nuance or compromise or diplomacy in their lives ever. Yet we find that they’re driving the entire conversation of our culture.’
‘Death is only a tragedy if it’s that person’s fault, and it is Lance’s fault,’ Russell tells me. ‘In episode six, he’s clearly told to go home.
‘He’s warned to such an extent that a ghost has to rise from the grave from another programme to warn him (Queer as Folk’s Hazel Tyler makes a rather spooky appearance) to stop, and he doesn’t listen because he fancies someone.’
Unfortunately for Lance, his fate was decided long before Russell hit print on his word processor, as the Doctor Who showrunner wanted to use Cucumber to fix what he saw as a skittishness around death.
It was this ambition that led to episode six, a turning point in the drama presented as a flashback through Lance’s dying eyes.
‘Episode six set out to do things beyond what Cucumber was about,’ he tells me. ‘I’ve written a lot of deaths. I started working on soap operas where people were forever falling down stairs and dying, but they were treated very lightly, when death is actually the biggest thing in the world.
‘I’d always been dying to write an episode of a drama with a death in it that feels like a death, so you feel like an entire life has come to an end, the tragedy of the most ordinary person dying… I mean, I’ve never had more motivation to write something in my life.’
Interestingly, Russell reveals this episode would eventually lead him to his next queer story – the critically acclaimed It’s a Sin, which deals with the Aids epidemic.
Russell got 'lucky'
When we asked Russell about telling LGBTQ+ stories, he admitted he feels very lucky to be in a position to tell them…
‘I’m just very lucky that I’m the one who got to write it down. If Jonathan Harvey weren’t so slow, (Russell asked us to include this Jonathan, sorry), he would have written it first.
‘I’m lucky, and I got to write it before he did, or any other gay writer. I think these things were rising within the soap operas. Gay characters were appearing… there was a kind of animus in the air for this kind of thing.
‘It felt like a very inevitable rise towards Queer as Folk, and I’m the one who got to write it. And believe you me, there were a lot of writers at the time looking around, saying, “Who the f*** is he?”
‘There were a lot of sort of heirs apparent who didn’t do the hard work of sitting down and actually writing it.’
‘You can start to see me turning that lens,’ he acknowledges. ‘Lance has flashbacks of that boyfriend who died of Aids. My own head was moving towards writing It’s A Sin.’
Now, however, Russell’s head is moving in another direction. His trilogy is set to become a quadrilogy with Tip Toe, a show he lovingly describes as Cucumber’s ‘progeny’.
‘I was literally driven to this desk to write Tip Toe because of the insanity we’re hurtling towards at a ridiculous speed,’ he stresses, before adding it will deal with the great danger we’re all in, gay or straight.
‘It’s an extension of all [Cucumber’s] themes, who we are, how we express ourselves – our wider community, not just gay men, trans characters, lesbian characters – and the pitfalls of life today.’
Of course, the big question you may be asking is what happened to Russell’s friend? The one whose threesome features in a TV show that went on to win Russell his Bafta?
Well, in Russell’s words, ‘the friendship survived, but I was lucky’.
Russell T Davies and the Cucumber cast will be taking part in the ’10 Years of Cucumber’ panel at the New Century Hall, Manchester, on Wednesday 20 August 2025 at 8pm.
Tickets available at https://www.scenefestival.com/
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