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May 27, 2015
In The Mix

Age Appropriate

To tell the stories of a middle-aged gay man and the younger men in his circle, a prominent writer-producer opts for two interlinking series.

Christine Champagne

Russell T Davies bolstered gay representation on television in a big, bold way when he created the British drama series Queer As Folk back in the late 1990s, though he is rather modest about his role as a boundary buster.

"Television is desperate for new material all the time, and it's a revolution that would have happened with or without me. I'm just very, very glad that I was in the right place and wrote well enough to get it made," says the Wales native, who saw his groundbreaking series adapted for a successful run in the U.S. on Showtime.

Devoted to depicting the lives of LGBT people on television, Davies, a gay man himself, went on to spearhead the 2005 revival of Doctor Who and introduced gay, lesbian and bisexual characters to the iconic sci-fi series, including Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), a bisexual character that Davies would later make the lead in the Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood.

Now Davies is masterminding Cucumber and Banana, a pair of interconnected drama series featuring LGBT characters and set in Manchester, England. (The show titles were inspired by the terms Swiss researchers applied to varying degrees of male arousal.)

Airing in the U.S. on Logo TV after a run in Britain, Cucumber and Banana share characters and overlapping stories; they are running as an event series, with eight episodes per show.

Dramatic as well as darkly funny, Cucumber focuses on Henry (Vincent Franklin), a 40-something gay man who suffers a midlife crisis after his partner of nearly 10 years proposes marriage.

Davies says he enjoyed writing for a character dealing with the challenges of middle age. "I think middle age is fascinating," he muses. "It's when you start to become more invisible, but it's also when you start to become more yourself, and some of the battles have been won."

To fully tell Henry's story, Davies knew he would have to keep the focus on his protagonist. So he also created Banana to share the stories of the younger LGBT characters introduced in Cucumber.

And while he wrote every hour-long episode of Cucumber himself, Davies hired a diverse group of young writers to script the 30-minute episodes of Banana.

"It's getting the next generation involved," he says. "I wanted to give them the chance to have the chances that I had. We had a brilliant time working on it, and I've made lifelong friends."

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