Russell T Davies has built a career out of telling stories that make people uncomfortable. From reviving Doctor Who to dragging queer British life onto prime time television, the Welsh screenwriter has never shied away from a fight. But now, for the first time, he admits the fight has started coming to his front door.
Davies, who grew up in Swansea and remains one of Wales’s most celebrated creative exports, says years of online abuse linked to his support for trans rights has crossed a line he never expected. He now keeps a kitchen knife by his front door, ready to use if needed.
“I’ve been saying for years that our rights are paper-thin, and here we are,” he said in a new interview to coincide with the release of his memoir. “One person turned up at my house. If you believe a paedophile lives here, it’s not the maddest thing in the world to come and get me.”
The abuse stems largely from his vocal support for transgender people, which has made him a target for online campaigns pushing the kind of groomer and paedophile smears that have become a common weapon against LGBT+ allies. He specifically named Father Ted creator Graham Linehan, who has become one of the most prominent anti-trans voices in British public life, as someone whose rhetoric has fuelled the harassment.
“I’m called a paedophile and a groomer online by people like Graham Linehan, and now people believe what they read,” Davies said. “People believe it when they’re told the Earth is flat.”
What worries him most is not the individual threats but the bigger picture. He sees the rise of algorithmic hate as something close to unstoppable, at least for now. “Nothing is going to unseat these tech barons. It will require some sort of revolution to stop them. For the first time in history, hatred is being monetised by an algorithm.”
It is a striking admission from a man widely known for his relentless optimism. Davies has a reputation in the industry as one of the warmest, most upbeat people working in television, and even in this interview he cannot help putting a positive spin on some genuinely grim material. A story about being physically attacked by a gang of bus conductors gets dismissed with a casual wave. “People have been beaten up far worse than me, that was just a bit of a thumping in the street.”
He is similarly breezy about one of the most painful periods of his life. When his husband Andrew Smith died in 2018 after a long illness, Davies was deep in production on his drama Years and Years and had little choice but to keep working. “Writing was a nice escape,” he said simply.
Smith’s death and Davies’s grief sit at the heart of his new memoir, which charts his extraordinary career alongside the more personal story of love and loss. The book covers his time reviving Doctor Who in 2005, a move that turned a cancelled relic into a global phenomenon, through to his recent return to the show and his eventual handover to a new generation.
Even his relationship with Doctor Who fandom, which can be one of the more intense corners of the internet, gets the trademark Davies shrug. The Whovian community has not always been kind to him, and some of the hostility from that direction has been almost as fierce as the anti-trans abuse, though obviously for very different reasons.
What comes through clearly is that Davies has never really written for approval. His landmark series Queer as Folk, which aired in 1999 and depicted gay life in Manchester with a frankness that shocked and thrilled in equal measure, was never going to win him universal friends. Neither was his decision to bring a openly gay character to the centre of Doctor Who, or his later drama It’s a Sin, which told the story of the AIDS crisis in Britain and became one of the most watched programmes of the pandemic era.
He has always understood that visibility comes with a cost. What has changed, he says, is the scale and the danger. The online world and the real world are no longer separate places, and for Davies that shift has meant a knife by the door and a fear he cannot quite shake.
“What scares me is that I can’t see an end to it,” he said.
Bloody hell, that’s grim reading. No one should have to live like that regardless of what you think of his work or opinions. Hope he stays safe.
Blimey, death threats over a TV show. People need to have a serious word with themselves. Glad he’s speaking out about it though, no one should have to live like that.