The Queerest of Folk by Russell T Davies

Darlings, get the kettle on and clear an evening, because Russell T Davies has finally sat down to tell us how the sausage, sorry, the drama, gets made, and it is every bit as fizzy, filthy and heart-cracking as you'd hope.

For five decades now, this proudly Welsh writer has been quietly (and not so quietly) rewiring British telly from the inside, splitting his time between Cardiff and Manchester and never letting either place stop shaping his voice. He gave us the swagger of Canal Street nightlife before mainstream audiences were remotely ready for it, brought a very human, very political grief to the AIDS crisis generation, regenerated a beloved sci-fi institution into something warmer and queerer than it had ever dared be, and somehow found time to make us laugh and weep in equal measure along the way. The Queerest of Folk doesn't rank these achievements or play favourites; it treats a Saturday-teatime Time Lord and a Manchester rent boy with the same tender curiosity, exactly right for a writer who's never believed in a hierarchy of stories worth telling.

Co-written with journalist Boyd Hilton, whose fingerprints show up as a steadying, sharp-eyed hand rather than a starry cameo, the book lets Davies talk the way he writes: fast, funny, and disarmingly honest; with a distinctly Welsh warmth and wit running underneath it all. He takes us inside the actual mechanics of a working life in TV; the pitch meetings, the rewrites, the small miracles and larger disasters, while also cracking open something rarer: what it actually feels like when an idea catches fire in your head.

What lingers most, though, is his insistence that every script starts from something painfully ordinary. Loss, longing, unrequited love, sitting in a hospital corridor waiting for news nobody wants to hear, Davies argues these are universal enough to build entire worlds from, and he's mined his own life for exactly that, letting his younger gay self fuel one project, his teenage years fuel another, his middle age fuel a third. It's a generous, almost matter-of-fact way of explaining how the personal becomes the political becomes prime-time, all filtered through a very Welsh refusal to take himself too seriously.

For queer readers especially, this isn't just industry gossip (though there's plenty of that too), it's a vital record of how visibility gets built, script by stubborn script, by a Welsh boy made good who never stopped believing telly could pull a fractured world back together for an hour at a time.

Warm, whip-smart and unmistakably him: RTD writes exactly like he talks, which means you'll want to argue with him, laugh at him, and possibly propose marriage, all within a single chapter. Buy it, queue it up next to Doctor Who on the shelf, and prepare to fall in love with television, and one of Wales's finest export, all over again.

Out now: Hardback £25

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