Tip Toe review: A shocking start sets the tone for a gripping tale of neighbours at war

It builds a creeping sense of dread – like Davies' pre-apocalyptic BBC series Years and Years – that compresses your world view until all you can see are neighbours Leo (Alan Cumming) and Clive (David Morrissey) and horrific collision course they seem stuck on.

Davies' work on Doctor Who suggests that he believes things can work out in the end, that humanity – and one Gallifreyan – can triumph and we can overcome the forces which would seek to repress those seen as somehow different.

His earthbound work, however, has a different tone.

Years and Years was a pessimistic peek into the future, of demagogues and death camps, nuclear weapons, economic hardship and global pandemics.

Here, his focus is tighter, but no less jaundiced about our direction of travel, as the politicians would have it.

Leo is a gay man, still coming to terms with a split from his long-term business and life partner Curtis (Charlie Condou). He owns a bar in Manchester's Canal Street area and – for the most part – is comfortable with his life and his place in the world.

Neighbour Clive, a stolid, working class electrician, is altogether itchier, abrasive, much less happy about what he sees around him.

His mood is not helped by huge, shouting cracks in his marriage, and two sons who may look a bit like him, but don't act like it.

From the moment Leo is locked out of his house, dressed in just a T-shirt and pants and forced to round to Clive's in a search for a spare key, the two are locked in a death spiral, each turn worse than the last.

From Clive's bumptious insistence on a key-safe - “just in case” - to Leo offering Clive a job fixing the wiring at his bar and on to a text exchange with Clive's closeted son George and older son Saul's OnlyFans antics, the first two episodes career towards that shocking beginning.

Morrissey is great as Clive, quivering with the effort of stuffing down his feelings, and while his family find escape in sex of one sort or another, he gets his only release in videos of gruesome deaths he finds online.

Cumming's Leo, meanwhile, is only just beginning to become aware of the changes around him, unpleasant changes at that, his growing unease mirroring the viewer's.

But it's Paul Rhys, as the ageing Canal Street maven Melba, who stays with you. I've always found him a sinister presence onscreen and his slightly odd face with its plasticised sheen seems well-suited to being a serial killer in Luther or a sinister svengali in Ruth Rendell's Gallowglass.

Here, though, he is melancholic, more aware of the coming dangers than Leo, and bitter at battles which were seemingly won, only for the war to be lost.

As he tells Leo: “They tricked us, didn't they? They just waited. Oh, they let us all come out and now we're standing in the open, waiting for them to shoot us down.

“I used to walk into a room and just go 'ta-da'. Now I tip-toe, just in case.”

The doominess of it all is leavened by some humour, but even that comes from a place of fear, as Leo's trans employee Zee is forced to move out of her house-share by the bullying of her flatmates.

Leo, Zee and friends go to get her things from the house, which turns into a madcap chase involving a scary-looking BB gun.

You hope that opening vignette can somehow be made different by some sliding doors moment, that it can be avoided if someone makes a different decision, turns a different corner.

But you fear there is no such hope to be found in Tip Toe, that Leo, Clive and the rest of us are too far down a particular road to make a U-turn now.

And that maybe the shock is the only thing that can get us to change.