I Can See Clary Now

Back in the 1980s, before Will and Grace and before Graham Norton and before every chick-lit heroine had a Gay Best Friend, a skinny man in glittery make-up and spandex would appear on television programmes clutching a tiny little dog and deadpanning a crop of boundary stretching double (and single) entendres about bum-sex, willies and homophobia. This man was Julian Clary, and since his days as a rabble-rousing taboo-busting alternative comic, he’s become, in the UK, a Strictly Come-Dancing starring “national treasure”. He also got a new semi-autobiographical show which puts him in reflective mode for his interview with Hot Press.

“Comedy was a very different scene back in the 1980s,” he explains. “It was all quite subversive and decidedly left-wing and underground and a bit more devil-may-care. Nowadays it’s much more cutthroat and commercial. I try to ignore all that side of it and be true to myself and do my own thing. It was very separate from the whole entertainment world back in the ‘80s. The established mainstream stars were all about bowties and mother-in-law jokes. Alternative comedy was much more diverse. Some of it was shocking but all of it was sincere, which I think was the main difference between it and mainstream comedy.
He continues: “And you have to put it into the context of the times. There was a lot of anger around; the Thatcher years gave us all something to rail about. And although my act wasn’t very political I could tap into that and use it. And my audience were all quite left-wing and I liked that. Although my act was really all about me, being a confrontational gay act was great fun. I quite liked getting Daily Mail readers annoyed. It was a very satisfying thing to do.”
Like when in 1993 he told the audience at the British Comedy Awards that you’d been backstage “fisting Norman Lamont” prompting the likes of Garry Bushell to campaign to have you banned from television.
“Well, that was the product of other things,” he laughs. “Drugs mainly. I deal with that incident in the show,” he adds enticingly. “Let’s just say if someone like Garry Bushell liked my show it would have been upsetting. It was a pleasure to upset people like that. I’d have been horrified if Garry Bushell actually liked me.”
Such attention-seeking behaviour didn’t originally come naturally to young Julian prior to his forays into alternative comedy. “How does one go from being a shy retiring Catholic schoolboy to being a promiscuous drug-taking man-about-town?” he asks.
“I suppose my schooling has a lot to answer for. It was very oppressive and conventional and very anti-gay. So when I then left school and went to university and suddenly found myself in a very liberal and accepting environment it all exploded. I was just doing what everyone else was doing in the ‘80s and early ‘90s in a way... I was putting it about.”
At this stage he hadn’t even considered comedy.
“I had planned to be an actor,” he explains. “And of course my voice and my mannerisms meant I wasn’t very versatile, shall we say. Anyway, I had a friend who was doing a puppet act in what was then the embryonic beginnings of the alternative cabaret circuit. So I went along to watch that and I could see that there was nothing to stop anyone getting 10 minutes of material together and standing up there and just doing it… which is what I did. I had my little dog ‘Fanny the Wonderdog’ who used to come up onto the stage with me... what am I saying? It wasn’t a stage, it was just a room above a pub. It started like that as simply something to do on a Thursday night. This was before anyone was taking alternative comedy in anyway seriously. I don’t think anyone I knew was thinking that their act could be a career or a stepping stone to anything else. Nonetheless it slowly grew and then The Comedy Store opened. And suddenly Friday Night Live was on Channel 4 and they’d pluck acts from the alternative circuit and the likes of me found ourselves on television and then all sorts of other things were possible.”
From there Clary went on to star in The Joan Collins Fanclub and the sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme and things have changed significantly in his life since then. He’s taken to writing books, for example, first an autobiography and then a novel.
We have Strictly Come Dancing to blame for this, he reveals.
“I enjoyed that so much,” he says. “Partly because it raised my profile, but mainly because it got me learning again and taught me that there were plenty of things I could do if I put my mind to it. It made me much braver. And so I was happy to go and attempt to write a novel (Murder Most Fab) which I would never have dared to do before, and to appear in a West End Musical (first Cabaret and then Boy George’s autobiographical musical, Taboo), which for someone who can’t sing and dance is quite a challenge.”
The biggest change in his life, however, is how comfortably he’s taken to a staid and relaxing middle age. The crazy lifestyle of yesteryear is now a distant memory.
“I so enjoy being clear headed now,” he says. “I think it would be awful if one was still sniffing and snorting and hanging around nightclubs wearing lycra at the age of 50. Now, there are some people who chose to do that, but I was very happy to see that without any conscious decision on my part, that life just faded away. Then I found to my surprise that relationships can actually be very interesting; much more interesting, in fact, than having a different man every night. My boyfriend and I have very different lives, but it suits us. He works in advertising, in an office, basically, and I’m out there being a camp comic. Refreshingly he’s not particularly interested in my career, nor I in his, it has to be said.”
Not that he’s lost the yen for performance. He likes “a bit of nerves”, he says.
“I’m not an overconfident performer anyway,” he notes, “but then I don’t find it very appealing to watch people who’re very full of themselves; people like… Piers Morgan. I actually think ‘oh I’m glad I’m not like that.’ With my shows there’s always a bit of danger and thus a fear of things going wrong. I do a lot of messing around with the audience and that can be fabulous but it can also be risky… which adds to the nerves. For this tour I’ve written a couple of songs which are the highlights for me. I’ve written one called ‘Probably You’re Gay’ which is for people who’re confused about their sexuality. I’ve also got a psychic demonstration in which I demonstrate that I and a member of the audience are psychic. Oh, and I enter on roller-blades. What more could you want from a night out?”

Julian Clary comes to Vicar St on October 23.