Readers are discovering a candid new Russell T Davies memoir about television, grief and creative conflict. From Queer as Folk and Doctor Who to It’s a Sin, the book traces how one outspoken Welsh writer reshaped British screens, while showing the personal doubts, arguments and losses behind his most influential work.

Essential Takeaways

  • A career in motion: The memoir focuses on Davies’ working life in television rather than offering a conventional childhood-to-present biography.
  • Queer as Folk changed the conversation: The series presented gay life with humour, sex and complexity at a time when mainstream television rarely did so.
  • Doctor Who brought huge visibility: Davies helped return the programme to Saturday-night television and became unusually recognisable for a writer.
  • Grief informs the work: His late partner Andrew Smith’s illness influenced some of the emotional material in It’s a Sin.
  • Creative confidence has a darker twin: Davies presents his public forcefulness as a way of managing the self-doubt that comes with writing.

The memoir is less a life story than a television life

Russell T Davies’ new memoir, The Queerest of Folk: A Life in Television, doesn’t follow the familiar celebrity formula of childhood memories, career milestones and neatly packaged wisdom. Instead, it moves through the programmes that shaped his professional life, making television the organising principle.

That approach gives the book a brisk, restless energy. As the Guardian’s review suggests, Davies writes with the directness audiences have come to expect from his interviews and scripts, allowing the working process, rather than private chronology, to take centre stage.

There’s something fitting about that structure. Davies has spent decades turning personal experience into public drama, and here the production room, writers’ meeting and broadcast studio become the places where his story really happens.

Why Russell T Davies has always divided opinion

Davies’ career has been powered by a combustible combination of confidence, impatience and doubt. He can be charming and generous, but he also describes himself as someone prepared to fight for a better script or a stronger show.

That tension matters because his work has rarely been timid. Queer as Folk challenged television’s assumptions about gay characters, while his revival of Doctor Who made the programme feel bright, accessible and emotionally immediate again. Time’s account of the original series’ importance places it within a wider history of gay representation on television, where Davies’ contribution remains difficult to ignore.

The result is a creator audiences often feel entitled to argue with. Doctor Who fans can be affectionate one minute and furious the next, particularly when ratings, casting or creative direction become part of the conversation. Davies appears to understand that volatility, even when he finds the hostility exhausting.

From Queer as Folk to Doctor Who, the stakes kept rising

When Queer as Folk arrived in 1999, it wasn’t simply another drama with gay characters. It was frank, funny and unapologetically centred on gay life, which made it both exhilarating and deeply controversial. Its impact is still visible in later television, particularly in the way queer characters are now allowed to be messy, sexual, funny and fully human.

Davies then took on a very different challenge with Doctor Who. The revived series had to welcome existing fans without becoming impenetrable to newcomers, and it had to make science fiction feel like a national television event again. That balancing act helped turn the programme into one of the BBC’s most recognisable modern brands.

According to industry coverage gathered by TechRadar, Davies’ broader body of work includes projects that move well beyond genre entertainment, from Years and Years to It’s a Sin and Tip Toe. The range is part of his appeal. He can deliver spectacle, camp, social urgency and devastating intimacy, sometimes within the same project.

The human cost behind the television hits

The most affecting sections of the memoir concern Andrew Smith, Davies’ long-term partner, who lived for years with an inoperable brain tumour before his death in 2018. The relationship sits at the emotional centre of the book, even though Davies’ public career occupies much of its surface.

That grief also found its way into his scripts. Scenes in It’s a Sin draw on experiences from Smith’s illness, not as a simple act of transcription but as a way of understanding emotions that were difficult to name at the time. The Guardian’s interview coverage highlights how closely Davies’ private losses and creative imagination remain connected.

It’s a striking reminder that television writers don’t always leave the work behind when the day ends. Sometimes the material follows them home, sits quietly for years and then reappears in a scene that feels painfully true.

What readers can expect from The Queerest of Folk

The audiobook listing from Apple Books presents the title as a portrait of Davies’ life in television, and that description is useful because the book isn’t trying to explain every corner of his personality. It’s more interested in how a writer keeps working through success, backlash, illness, bereavement and the pressure of being publicly recognisable.

Readers looking for a traditional behind-the-scenes account should find plenty to enjoy, particularly the passages about developing shows and defending creative decisions. Fans of Doctor Who, meanwhile, may be drawn to the candid discussion of fandom and the uneasy relationship between a programme’s makers and its most devoted viewers.

The wider appeal is simpler. Davies has spent years making television that insists on feeling something, whether that feeling is joy, embarrassment, anger or grief. His memoir seems to offer the same mix, only with the camera turned towards him.

It's a vivid account of how one difficult, generous and relentlessly energetic voice changed British television.

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