Russell T Davies is showing me a snippet of film on his phone in a Manchester restaurant. There, on the screen, is Maxine Peake as you’ve never seen her before. She’s standing in a forest as a proud Amazonian queen, with shield and on-trend Miley Cyrus faux hawk hairstyle.

Truly, Peake has never played a role further removed from her performance as charming simpleton Twinkle in Dinnerladies. I put on my glasses. Is that muscle tone? Now she’s shouting angrily in iambic pentameter. “She’s posh and rough at the same time,” says Davies. “Only Maxine could do that.”

Then something even more unexpected happens. From across the clearing comes a lightning bolt that smacks into Peake’s chest. It looks like a Doctor Who/Game of Thrones mash-up, but what we’re watching is a scene from Davies’s new 90-minute adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, part of the BBC’s spring season of plays commemorating 400 years since Shakespeare’s death. Matt Lucas will be Bottom (naturally) and other cast members include Bernard Cribbins, Richard Wilson and – my personal favourite – Elaine Paige as Mistress Quince.

'A Midsummer Night's Dream was my first drama … I was 11 when I gave Swansea my Bottom' Russell T Davies

“Dreams, chases, people changing identities and species,” he says. “If that’s not an episode of Doctor Who, I don’t now what is.” Clearly, you can take the man out of Doctor Who, but not Doctor Who out of the man. “I’ve wanted to make this for 30 years,” he says, setting about his eggs benedict. But his obsession with the play goes back even further. “It was the first drama I was in.” He pauses. “I was 11 when I gave Swansea my Bottom.”

Davies has been sent the footage of Peake getting zapped so he can sign off on the special effects. The lightning bolt was fired by Theseus at Peake’s Hippolyta: in Davies’s reboot of the Bard, the former is a fascist ruler holding the latter as a prisoner of war. He insists, however, that he’s been faithful to the play. “I have only changed five words” In fact, he argues he’s been more faithful than Shakespeare. “Its title is its greatest enemy. It’s not summer. The seasons have been turned upside down. It’s a tough, wintry place.”

We’re meeting because Davies this week receives a British Writers’ Guild award for his outstanding contribution to his craft. He expects an evening of glowers and seething resentment from less-fortunate creatives. “I’ll be hated by writers who can’t get anything put on. I just walk into the BBC and I’m getting the thing made.” He shrugs: “I’m making hay while I can. In 10 years, they won’t want me any more.” Why do they want you now? “There’s still a memory of what I did to Doctor Who.”

‘The assumption is that teenage gay men are guilt-free hedonists’ … Queer As Folk stars (from top) Craig Kelly, Aiden Gillen and Charlie Hunnam. Photograph: Channel 4

That cachet, he worries, will fade – but not, he hopes, before he gets to adapt Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. He wants to do to the novel what Andrew Davies is currently doing to War and Peace. “He’s really upsetting the Tolstoy scholars with all the sex, isn’t he? It’s magnificent. I want to do the same, really wind up the Dickens scholars.”

Davies became famous in 1999 with his Manchester-set gay rites-of-passage drama Queer As Folk and, later, by reviving the venerable sci-fi franchise Doctor Who after a 16-year hiatus. His father was blind by the time Queer As Folk was broadcast on Channel 4, so his mother would describe the scenes of masturbation and rimming to him. Davies can’t quite imagine the words she used. And now he will never know: his mum died in 1999, his dad last November. He says they were strait-laced teachers who resembled characters from Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. That said, he knows that they had to put up with a lot of flak when Queer As Folk was broadcast and he’s proud they dealt with it without troubling their son.

Neither saw his three interconnected shows for Channel 4 shown last year. Cucumber, Banana and Tofu were named after categories of hard-on and were, as the Guardian’s Sam Wollaston put it, “gloriously, explicitly, triumphantly, cucumberly” gay. Cucumber was Davies’ return to Manchester’s gay scene, but one in which the leading protagonist was not a spunky young buck but middle-aged man struggling in the era of Grindr and freely sexted genitals. “The assumption is that teenage gay men now are guilt-free hedonists, while men of my generation were closeted, ashamed and struggling with their sexuality. But teenagers are never happy. Not now and certainly not when I was a teenager.”

Davies recommends I watch another 15-minute drama he wrote alongside this triptych that Channel 4 put on its website. Screwdriver was a two-hander in which Cleo confronted her teenage son about porn. “It was a polemic brief about the ready availability and sharing of online pornography, particularly among children. What prompted it? “Kids watching porn. We’ve got to sit down and seriously think about what porn is doing to children. This is a world where girls as young as 10 post photos of their vaginas. Boys think they want to see shaved vaginas because that’s what they’re supposed to like. Those are the conversations on the school bus. It’s totally out of control.”

Davies is now working on a drama series called The Boys, set in the 1980s, in the time of hysteria about Aids and Section 28, that Putin-esque Tory clampdown on positive portrayals of homosexuality (one for which David Cameron publicly apologised). For all that it’s about Aids and denial, Davies is having fun writing it, partly because he writes while listening to some of the era’s most unspeakable music, including Hooked on Classics and Stars on 45, to get in the mood. “I love it all,” he says. “You never stop coming out of the closet! Don’t get me started on Jive Bunny.”

He’s just written a scene in which someone meticulously counts out some change in halfpenny pieces, which went out of circulation in 1984. Getting such period details right is difficult. “Remember when people would listen to landline answerphone messages? Nobody does that now.”

The Boys is also about Davies going back to his past to right a wrong. “I want to tell stories about people I knew who died. They were told you’re going to die – and die because of sex. It’s was like homophobes’ wish fulfilment.” He clearly feels he needs to honour his friends’ deaths. “I didn’t go to their funerals. Didn’t say anything when they were said to have died of cancer when they really died of Aids. Didn’t get in touch with their mums. I did some charity stuff but I didn’t do enough. I wish I could have been more militant, but that’s not me.”

I’m not on this Earth to defend Margaret Thatcher, but they were out of their depth. They didn’t know anything…

Will he address how the government dealt with Aids in the 1980s? “My instinct is not to because that’s more fittingly done as documentary. Imagine a doc about Thatcher and [then health secretary] Norman Fowler’s attitudes to Aids. If I made them characters, it would get skewed. I’d be worrying who’d play Thatcher.”



He pauses. “I’m not on this Earth to defend Margaret Thatcher, but they were out of their depth. They didn’t know anything and” – he checks himself, as if he can’t bear to carry on sympathising with the Tories – “well, if they didn’t know anything, they should have done more to find out. That’s what governments should do.”

What the Thatcher government did do was run a series of public health ads, in which John Hurt intoned portentously as a tombstone was inscribed: “There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all. It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure.” The camera frames the finished inscription: “Aids.” For all that the ad was charged with panic-mongering and upsetting children, Davies defends it. “Their ads were terrifying and, in terms of gay sex, demonising. But they were powerful – not many ad campaigns are remembered 30 years on.”

The first of a trilogy named after categories of hard-on … Cucumber. Banana and Tofu followed. Photograph: Ben Blackall/PR Image

He started writing The Boys because something happened to make him reflect on death. In 2011 his partner, Andrew Smith, was diagnosed with brain cancer and given a 3% chance of surviving. At the time, they had been living happily in LA: Davies had stepped down as Doctor Who’s executive producer and was being courted by Lucasfilm to write a Star Wars TV series.

So why come back to Britain? “We needed to be home. You don’t want to be ill in a foreign country. You want to be home with fish and chips and Coronation Street. Andrew’s family is in Hull and they needed to be nearby. Plus the NHS – my god, it’s been brilliant. I said we could afford to go private. But there was no need to. The care, including Macmillan nurses, has been superb.”

How’s Andrew? “He’s fine.” Is he working? “God no. He can walk the dog. He made me dinner for the first time the other night. Very good spaghetti bolognese. So grateful. I can’t stand cooking!” Davies glances at his phone. Andrew has just texted him the news that Alan Rickman has died. “Can’t quite believe it. He was so great. We asked him to be in Doctor Who so often.”

No one has yet has commissioned The Boys. Davies is aware that what he’s writing is massively sensitive. I wonder if being British TV’s most celebrated gay writer can be a burden? This, after all, is someone who, following years of appearing in the Independent on Sunday’s Pink [now Rainbow] List of gay movers and shakers, was listed in 2013 as a permanent member of its national treasures. “Of course! And I’m bound to get it wrong. Somebody’s going to say, ‘That didn’t represent me or my struggle.’ And they’re right. But that’s not why I write.”

He sips his coffee. “And that’s not why people watch. They don’t watch to see themselves on screen. And if they did, they wouldn’t like it. Who likes seeing photos of themselves? But when I’m writing well – and sometimes I do – you will see yourself in any character, in Doctor Who, in Rose Tyler. If the writing’s good you see yourself as Tintin, Charlie Brown … anybody.”

It’s time for Davies to get back to writing. Is he enjoying his work? “Yes and no. The thing about being older is that you have more doubts.” Funny – that’s exactly what strikes me about Davies today. I met him nine years ago when he was in his Doctor Who pomp. Today he’s different: not quite an unbounced Tigger, but humbler and more appealingly open to doubt.

Maybe that greater empathy makes you a better writer? “It certainly makes me a slower one. The mistakes and problems get bigger because your awareness gets bigger. I’m 52 and I can think of 20 or 20,000 ways to write a scene. And they’re all good.”