It's a Sin creator Russell T Davies on Manchester Pride: 'There's dangers - look at Clonezone - but this city's Gay Village always comes back'

Towering above the queues in a bright yellow raincoat at the centre of Manchester’s Gay Village, Russell T Davies is used to standing out from the crowd.

But, after almost 40 years calling Manchester home – and taking countless tales of the city to the small screen – he’s part of the furniture here on Canal Street.

Davies brought groundbreaking scenes of gay life and culture to television with his early 2000s drama based in his adopted home of Manchester, Queer as Folk. Then followed a TV writing career of increasing acclaim – from a stellar stint bringing Doctor Who to a new generation, with his scripts fronted by Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant, to his seminal telling of the HIV/AIDs epidemic in 2021’s, It’s a Sin.

Surrounded by young Pride festival go-oers, each yearning to explain just how much his creation of gay and queer worlds on screen has affected them, the award-winning TV writer is beaming.

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The Manchester Evening News caught up with Davies in the thick of Manchester Pride celebrations on Sunday morning (August 27). Asked if he thought It’s a Sin would garner the sweeping fanbase it now has, with the series shot around Greater Manchester having broken viewership records, Davies said: “Literally never. Can you imagine? As we were setting that up, we were making a Channel 4, late-night drama about gays. Even friends of mine rolled their eyes like ‘how worthy, well done Russell, there must be something more entertaining on BBC One’.

“We literally thought it was going to be worthy and be quietly tucked away in a dusty archive. So its success was absolutely extraordinary to us, one of the greatest