“If I’ve had a show on, I spend every December watching that countdown wondering if I’ll be on it – I think A Very English Scandal got to No 2.” He’s right, it did.
But he is particularly pleased to have won for It’s a Sin, the five-part drama about a group of young gay friends living – and dying – through the Aids era of the 80s and early 90s.
Nearly all the older boys went on to become drag queens.” But when Davies went to study English at the University of Oxford, the drag queens went to London to embrace a life of adventure.
In the series, Jill is close to all the boys, unites them when they fall out, fights for them when they are attacked, lies for them when they need cover, and emboldens them when they need strength.
Jill Nalder is an actor who spent 20 years in the chorus of Les Misérables and is now part of the WestEnders, a group that sing numbers from musicals on cruise ships.
“It must have been about 1990 when she told me about the mother and father turning up on a hospital ward to discover their son is gay, that he has Aids and is dying, all in one moment.
I lost the very first person I slept with, whose name I still can’t say because his parents don’t see his death as an Aids death.” Again, this is something we see in the drama – parents in denial, silenced by shame, insisting their boy died of pneumonia or cancer.
In It’s a Sin we see Ritchie, played by Olly Alexander, denying he is gay, then denying the existence of Aids itself.
Likable is very easy to write, isn’t it?” He prefers gay characters who are unlikable – not least because it subverts a trope in TV drama.
How can a virus discriminate alphabetically, he asks – how can it target everything beginning with H: homosexuals, haemophiliacs and Haitians.
Three years ago, Davies lost his husband and partner of 20 years, Andrew Smith, to a brain tumour.
“There’s that moment of Colin staring into space with his eyes flickering side to side.
“He’s partly somebody I fancied like mad, who I went out with once or twice, who worked in a gentleman’s outfitters and went to New York to measure lords for shirts.
We all lived with their deaths for so long, and doing it justice was an enormous weight to bear.
As well as the tragedy, he wanted to capture the exhilaration of youth – the laughter, the lust, the dreams. Davies mentions Mark, another friend who died.
I think of him laughing that time we stayed up all night, that awful man he went out with, and how we stole all his jumpers and ran away with them into the night.
It’s only since It’s a Sin that Davies has realised how little he and his friends have talked about this seminal period in their lives.
“A friend phoned me up in tears and said in the late 80s, he’d taken a friend who was dying into his flat to live in the spare room.
They’re all saying: ‘Oh my God, that was my uncle and he died of Aids, it wasn’t cancer, and I’m proud of him.
Davies is now putting his mind to other matters – a drama about Crossroads legend Noele Gordon, starring Helena Bonham Carter, and Doctor Who, which he has returned to after an 11-year-break.
In the first few months after he died, I once said something out loud to him then I knew he wouldn’t have heard me so I repeated it.
Maybe I should get out and buy a flat in town and go dating?” He answers his own question.
Unfortunately, everyone goes: ‘Oh, you’re the man who wrote Doctor Who.’ I’d never meet anyone off Grindr – I’ve got too much fear of being murdered.” You just look? “I write a lot about the modern world, and it’s very helpful.
I’ll probably nip upstairs that afternoon for a couple of hours.” Why should he stop, he says, when he loves it? “When I’m washing up or drawing or lying in bed or walking into town, I imagine dialogue from dramas I’ll never write.
“He said he’d give the profits to the Terrence Higgins Trust, and six months later he has singlehandedly raised £500,000.
Even his friends gave him a pitying look when he told them he was making a series about young men dying from Aids.