You could hear his voice halfway down the corridor: that sing-song, raspy tone, rising somewhere between a caterwaul and a boom, and falling into the conspiratorial hush of a serious neighbourhood gossip.
It was October 2012, and I had been sent by The Independent to interview the man behind the platinum, roots-an’-all wig. I was expecting saucy gags and a little light campery. I was not prepared for who I was about to find.
There was no one quite like Paul O’Grady. A benign battle-axe, forged on the doorsteps of the Wirral, that had risen like a phoenix from the fag ash of every gay dive bar in the north of England to the besequinned sheen of prime-time TV. A legend in everyone’s living room. He’s gone, sadly, but he leaves something vital behind that we need now more than ever.
A few days ago, Madonna released a statement on Instagram railing against the soaring anti-LGBTQ, anti-drag rhetoric in the US. She said, “Anyone with half a brain knows not to f**k with a drag queen.” She should have met O’Grady. As Lily Savage, his material was like a nuclear attack in 6-inch heels. His one-liners could kill.
The anecdote that crystalises this steel wit more than any other, is that in 1987, when he was working in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern (a legendary south London gay bar), the police raided while Lily was on stage. Because it was during the AIDS crisis, and because the Metropolitan police are institutionally stupid, they stormed the pub wearing rubber gloves lest they catch HIV off its patrons. Spotting this monstrous sight from the stage, Lily quipped to the crowd: “Well, well, it looks like we’ve got help with the washing up.”
You can’t imagine – oh – Michael McIntyre coming up with a line like that on the hoof. Lily was arrested, but later said, “it was business as usual the next night”. Nothing would stop a talent that huge. Not the police, and not the pale, male and stale television executives that would never have dreamt of putting a drag queen on teatime telly until it became impossible to resist Lily. The hilarity, warmth, and Cilla-Black-style-realness brought everyone, of all ages, genders, and orientations around the box.
That she was asked to front Blankety Blank in 1998, at a time when gay people didn’t even have an equal age of consent, let alone The Equality Act to stop people being fired for their sexuality, was nothing short of miraculous. It was a show, lest we forget, previously occupied by Les Dawson. The man who made mother-in-law jokes.
But out of drag and away from cameras? That day we met in the Langham hotel, just opposite the BBC, O’Grady was like a high-voltage electric fence, crackling and stunning every question that hit him. Righteous fury poured out. He was self-aware enough to know that this – not the leopard print mini-skirts, not the smoking, shop-lifting, shagging-for-chips character he’d invented – was what had made him a success. The propulsive force within him was, he said, “a hotbed of simmering anger”.
The following quotes all come from just one hour in his company. “The Catholic Church has no right to wag the finger at gay people. How can we respect a church that has encouraged paedophiles by moving them from one parish to another, free to carry on again?” he raged.
On the Coalition government’s austerity policies, he railed: “It’s Sheriff-of-Nottingham times: ‘What do the working classes eat? Pasties. Let’s tax those. Where do they go on their holidays? In static caravans. We’ll tax them.’ I didn’t notice a tax on polo mallets. I loathe Cameron; I loathe Osborne. We didn’t vote them in and yet here they are deciding for us.”
He was not exactly sparing when it came to former politicians either. When I asked about Ann Widdecombe’s opposition to same-sex marriage he replied: “What does she know about love or marriage? She’s an eternal virgin. She’ll have on her tombstone, ‘Return to sender, unopened.'”
He called Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of The Sun, who was responsible for the infamous front page falsely accusing Liverpool fans at the Hillsborough disaster of pickpocketing victims and urinating on police, “a skid mark on the face of journalism”.
Yet for all this rage, in his latter years, O’Grady turned to a different source of inspiration for his work, with his tender, tear-jerking For the Love of Dogs programmes. Has anyone else in history gone from wise-cracking drag queen, to prime-time game-show hostess, to cuddly pet presenter? They have not.
Paul, you see, wasn’t a stereotype of a gay man, but an archetype: a layer-cake with humour atop, anger just beneath, and right in the centre the love and compassion of someone who knows what it is to be vulnerable.
O’Grady had already had two heart attacks by the time we met and he had already made preparations for his death. There’s one final quote I want to leave you with, not least because it made his own solicitor crack up laughing. Paul told me he’d put the following comments in his will as part of the instructions that no one should resuscitate him in the event of incapacitating illness: “God help anyone who ignores my wishes, because when your turn comes to die I’ll be stood at the gates of hell waiting for you.”
So I’d say the best way to mourn our Paul, apart from watching re-runs of his greatest bon-mots, is to raise your voice, take off your heels and fight back. Protest every pompous idiot, counter every hateful lie, vote against every political cruelty, rage against every abusive institution – and do it with a deadly one-liner.
