Tip Toe Creator Shares How He Filmed Its Brutal Finale Without Scaring The Public

Content note: the following contains descriptions of a very violent scene.

Throughouthttps://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/news/russell-t-davies/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> Russell T Davies’ https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/news/tip-toe/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Tip Toe, viewers are shown a clip of character Leo (played by https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/news/alan-cumming/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Alan Cumming)’s body hanging from a lamppost.

This is the end of the show: the series depicts the events that lead up to the horrific lynching.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tip-toe-ending-leo-russell-t-davies_uk_6a294c67e4b01046d715b6b8">The brutal scene was “difficult” to film, the show’s creator told HuffPost UK previously. 

And in a new interview with https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/feeds/v" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Independent, Russell explained how the moment was shot without alarming the public.

“It took about three days to film as we had to be very careful with it,” he told the publication.

“There was a school nearby that broke up at 3:30pm, so we had to stop at that point every single day.

We were next to quite a major A road, so we had to erect huge screens to block off the set, otherwise, cars driving along would have seen a man hanging, and we could have caused an accident.” 

He continued, “It was all very complicated and meticulously planned – we had to build that lamppost.

“We had Alan Cumming, a stuntman, and a dummy.

When the crew first hoisted the dummy up into the air, absolute silence fell over the entire street.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and just stood there, as the enormity of it hit us.”

Despite the “terrible” nature of the scene, Russell added, it was “lovely” to shoot because of the “care and dedication” the team had for one another. 

And a timing trick helped to make the shoot less daunting, too. 

“Our producer Phil Collinson did one of the cleverest things I’ve ever seen, which is that he arranged for the hanging to be done just before the shoot’s one-week break, so that everyone could let go of it and shake it off.

It gave people time to recover from something that was genuinely traumatic,” said the https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/news/its-a-sin/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">It’s A Sin writer. 

“For Alan, filming it, he had to be at the centre of a lot of hostility.

Even though it’s acting, you still have to be held back and have a rope put around your neck, and so he was absolutely delighted it was over.

“That’s one of the reasons why we didn’t do the shoot chronologically; we didn’t want to shoot that last, because it would have been a horrible way for him to have left it and not a nice way to remember it.”

Lastly, he explained, Channel 4 worked with the team to ensure viewers had enough warning about the troubling scene.