Séamas O'Reilly: Paul O'Grady was loyal to his roots, both Irish and Merseyside
'The public became familiar, in fact infatuated, with the funny, warm and genuine man they accepted as one of their own'
This column is an odd fit for an obituary but, on the passing of Paul O’Grady, I felt moved to think of all the things he meant to me and the wider culture. Born to Irish parents in Birkenhead, O’Grady was loyal to his roots, whether Irish – he had pallets of turf shipped to his home in Kent for the smell – or the working classes of Merseyside – “Noel Coward said work is more fun than fun” he once wrote, “but then he didn’t work for Bird’s Eye packing frozen fish fingers nine hours a day, did he?”.
Like everyone else my age, I first encountered him in his drag alter-ego, Lily Savage, who performed the extraordinary feat of turning a barbed and scabrous drag act into a gigantic crossover success. It would be clumsy to describe Lily’s pathway from her weekly performances in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern to primetime TV as an “ascent”, since everything I’ve heard about those shows suggests they were more scintillating and propulsive than anything on TV at the time, tackling everything from the miners’ strikes to the AIDS crisis, and the Thatcher government’s increasingly draconian crackdowns on LGBT people.
In the wake of O’Grady’s death, many have referred to one signature moment, following a police raid during one of his shows in 1987. Such was their paranoia over HIV/AIDS at the time, the two dozen cops bursting into the venue were seen to be wearing rubber gloves.
“I was doing the late show” he wrote of the experience in 2021, “and within seconds the place was heaving with coppers, all wearing rubber gloves. I remember saying something like, ‘Well well, it looks like we’ve got help with the washing up.’”
So much of what I loved about O’Grady is in that story; the mordant wit, the uncompromising spirit. It’s easy to over-generalise Lily’s acidity as being misanthropic, when it could more accurately be described as defiant, and intractable from the time and place from which he sprung.
As Lily, O’Grady was nominated for a Perrier Award in 1991, by which time he’d already been appeared in three episodes of police soap The Bill, showcasing even then the cross-spectrum appeal that would lead to him playing royal variety performances, hosting the Big Breakfast, Blind Date and Blankety Blank, and turning in unmissable appearances on any chat show or daytime magazine programme going.
O’Grady’s appearances as himself, too, steadily increased, and the public became familiar, in fact infatuated, with the funny, warm and genuine man they accepted as one of their own. A man who had – as Eva Wiseman so beautifully put it – “a voice like broken biscuits” and could spin effortlessly from grouch to grandma without ever seeming to put anyone out in the process. I was one of his daytime devotees and, at a time when primetime television held little appeal for anyone my age, I fondly remember anything he did as appointment viewing, whether it was watching him take gently meandering trips down memory lane when discussing the Wigan Casino, or his unhinged policy of making his guests perform world record attempts. The latter practice, incidentally, led to surely one of the greatest moments in British television history, (and one almost no one seems to remember but me): the recklessly weird 60 seconds of 2008, in which Steve Guttenberg broke the Guinness World Record for preparing the most hot dogs in one minute (9).
He was someone as comfortable interviewing celebrities, doing travelogues, and championing the cause of animals, as he was launching attacks on government from the platform his success had afforded him. Inarguably, the most shared clip of his work this week, was his 2010 attack on the Tory government for their swingeing cuts on social services in the wake of the banking crisis. It’s remarkable, not just for the righteousness of its venom, or its well-worked clarity of message, but for the reaction it engenders in the audience, who whoop and cheer his every word. A cross-section of middle England, so often portrayed as lockstep supporters of their sensible betters in the media and political class, delighted to hear the anger, and purpose, in O’Grady’s voice. One wonders if more opposition leaders had harnessed even a fraction of that purpose, rather than blindly rebranding themselves as Diet Tories, would the self-same Conservative Party still be in power now, nearly 13 years later.
With hindsight, it’s tempting to marvel at O’Grady’s career from its beginnings; the gay, working-class, cross-dressing comedian finding household fame and acclaim among the mums and dads of 90s Britain. This was, after all, a polity still reeling from tabloid coverage of the AIDS crisis and the bruising battle over Section 28 of the Local Government Act - the 1988 law that explicitly banned the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities. A law which, lest we forget, remained on the statutes of England and Wales until 2003, or the entirety of O’Grady’s rise to fame.
Perhaps more shocking is to consider whether that same gay, working class, cross-dressing comedian would succeed if he were starting right now, when panic about gender means drag shows are being picketed everywhere from Santa Barbara to Skegness, and cultural behemoths like Ru Paul’s Drag Race are siloed to specialist audiences and away from the 20 million a night slots of prime-time telly. When aversion to overt politicism in the culture’s mainstream is at such a fevered pitch, it would be almost impossible to imagine O’Grady’s open-hearted agitprop being broadcast on British TV, or indeed any satire which didn’t revolve around well-mannered people in suits making jolly old jokes about the silly old government.
O’Grady wasn’t merely a skilled broadcaster who was, miraculously, well-liked by almost everyone – a feat so rare, it should be said, that it renders the use of the word “merely” there preposterous. His true special sauce was the grit that nestled behind his impossibly amiable, sometimes fantastical, exterior; the sense, ever present, that there were hardened knuckles beneath those arm-length gloves. His was a smile that showed the teeth, and we’re all the poorer without it.
