Julian Clary: The BBC banned me from saying ‘lesbian' before 9pm
On the off chance that you've not stumbled into the gameshow's latest iteration, the host has obviously changed – 'it's now that man from The Chase,' Clary says, meaning Bradley Walsh – but the format's much the same.
Ribaldry, innuendo and nonsense are encouraged. Clary, then, is a natural. 'Beforehand I was told, 'This is family viewing, mind what you say', which is fine,' he says, today.
At one point Walsh offered the following statement for guests to complete: 'If you want to convince someone that you're highly intelligent, tell them you're a world authority on *blank *.'
'They stopped the recording and told me to tone it down'
'I don't know why, but I put 'LESBIANS',' Clary says. At that point, 'they had to stop the whole recording to tell me to tone it down a bit.' Recounting this, he clinks his cappuccino into its saucer, then looks closer to crestfallen than indignant.
'I still don't understand why you can't say 'lesbians' on television before nine o'clock. Is there any reason for that?' He sighs. 'I think they're just so nervous now, so worried about what might offend someone, somewhere...'
We're sitting in the garden of Clary's local pub in Camden, north London, reflecting on all that's changed since he first moved here as a young comic, some four decades ago. At that time, in the mid-1980s, Clary brightened up the nation by sashaying onto the scene, wearing what Quentin Crisp called 'as much make-up as the human face will allow', and immediately began testing the limits of what's acceptable.
With his preternatural talent for double entendre – 'Ah, there's nothing I like more than a warm hand on my entrance,' he used to open with – and commitment to waspish camp, invariably he found those limits, kept going and gleefully danced on the other side. Infamously, he once went too far, when he took to the stage at the 1993 British Comedy Awards and claimed to have been 'fisting' the Tory chancellor, Norman Lamont (who was in the audience with his wife) backstage.
Society, and television, has changed since those days. We're less buttoned-up, but far more cautious with it. Now, the edgy, what-will-they-say-next comedy of something like Saturday Live, where Clary's generation – including Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Harry Enfield – were incubated, barely exists on TV.
'There's not much, is there?' he says. 'Channel 4 was our natural home, when that was new and dynamic. I don't know what there is now that's equivalent to that.'
Clary has changed too, of course. He is now 66, his friends are retiring and 'moving into bungalows', and while the wit's still sharp and the claws even sharper, there is a gentleness – almost a gentility – to him.
He does, after all, write hugely successful children's books and, now, cosy crime novels. He was a Strictly Come Dancing finalist and won Celebrity Big Brother. He delights in gardening, and is the annual highlight of the London Palladium pantomime. Clary would never call himself a national treasure, and he leaves the epithet 'stately homo' to Crisp, but he gladly calls himself a 'national trinket'.
The biographic blurb on his latest book, Curtain Call To Murder, claims he 'lives a reclusive life in Chatham, Kent' and 'recently married Timothée Chalamet'. In reality he lives a minute's walk away from here, with his husband of nine years, Ian Mackley, a film marketer.
At home he has two wardrobes, one for his muted 'normal' clothes, another for stage. Never the twain shall meet. 'The showbiz stuff is all in the basement. They smell of sweat. You wouldn't want those next to your own clothes.'
The man we know as 'Julian Clary' is not a character (his parents named him Julian after a Benedictine monk), but there is a clear division between the quiet, introverted man in the pub today, and the figure he cuts on stage.
The outfits help draw that line, at least in his own mind. 'On tour, definitely. It's all about preserving your energy, so you can be a zombie all day, then about 10 minutes before, the make-up and clothes will be on, and that's when you've got to up your energy levels. There's a certain setting in the brain, to be funny,' he says. 'It all helps, it all makes a statement. It's show business.'
Today he has clearly drawn from the normal wardrobe: a black Harrington jacket, black T-shirt, navy trousers and On running shoes. His hair is ashen and feathery, his glasses round. There has always been something delightfully avian about Clary's appearance, but if he was once a glorious peacock, he has become positively owlish.
But his health is good. 'Oh, fine. I'm very robust, good genes in my family.' His mother, Brenda, turned 94 this week. They share a love of Antiques Roadshow. 'She's a scream, we will talk every day without fail.' His skin is remarkably smooth – partly a result of those genes, partly a result of 'a man in Harley Street' who fires a laser at his face to stimulate collagen.
'I tried Ozempic, it's not for me'
He was also, he has said, 'early on the Botox train'. 'Yes, a long time ago. I think it all makes sense to do those things.' Despite never looking anything other than trim, he's also given Ozempic a go.
'I did try it. It's not for me. I got terribly ill.'
But you're so slim, I protest.
'Well, everyone else is on it. What it basically does is slow down your digestion, so food is inside you for a lot longer. My body didn't like that. Reflux. I think often these things are too good to be true.'
For a dozen years, until 2019, he really did live a reclusive life in Kent, dividing his time between Camden and Goldenhurst, a 17th-century manor and gardens near Ashford. The house was once owned by Noël Coward, and came to Clary's attention when his old friend Paul O'Grady, who owned a farm in Aldington, the same sleepy village, implored him to join him in the good life.
'I loved that house, I spent 10 years slowly doing it up bit by bit, but it was one of those things where once I'd done it all and sat in it for a few years, I felt done with it. So I sold it on a whim.'
The village pub didn't know what had hit it when Clary and O'Grady, who were on the cabaret circuit together in the 1980s, would occasionally install themselves on a Friday evening. But despite having dogs, chickens and ducks, Clary wasn't quite as taken with the countryside as his friend.
'Muddy, isn't it?' he says, grimacing. 'No pavements, no streetlights… I sort of enjoyed it as a contrast to here, but I sold it just before lockdown, and if I'd been able to choose where to spend lockdown, it wouldn't have been the country.'
It was also a bit of a faff. 'I've got a little London garden here, which suits me because I can do it all myself. I had to have gardeners in the country, and we never quite got on top of it. It was a beautiful place but it takes over your life. You're serving your house all the time, whereas here' – he flourishes a hand around – 'there's all the rest of life.'
He says that, but life in London is quiet. 'I'm 66,' he explains, when I ask where he goes out these days. Having recently finished a sold-out national tour, the Western-themed A Fistful of Clary, his routine now involves getting up early to walk his 'neurotic rescue dog', Gigi, a crossbreed, before writing at home each day.
In the past 20 years, Clary's written everything from memoirs to romance novels – or as he termed them, 'dick-lit'. His children's book series, The Bolds, about a family of hyenas living undercover in Surbiton, has sold more than half a million copies since it was published in 2015, and been translated into dozens of languages. He's also adapted it for the stage. It must be lucrative.
'I've often wondered what my children would be like'
'Children's books? Well, the foreign deals get you some money. But you've got to sell a lot of books. I like doing the children's book events, because they don't know who you are, and getting a laugh from a room full of children is as much a thrill as the Palladium.'
Clary, it turns out, loves children, and is never more animated than when he learns I have a two-month-old. Over the years, he's come close to being a father, 'but not close enough.' He once revealed that a university girlfriend (a one-off, no need to stop the presses) became pregnant with his child, only to miscarry. Later, in his forties, he considered having a baby with a lesbian friend, or potentially adopting.
He has since made peace with it, he says. 'Oh yes, that's for the best. You have a curiosity, you wonder, 'What would my children be like? Would they be nice, take me to the shops?''.
Children's books have now given way to a life of crime, with the breezy and extremely unserious A Curtain Call To Murder, which is set backstage at the Palladium. The prologue contains a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer – 'please don't think I'm just another opportunistic slapper whose literary agent told him this was where the money is' – but really that's precisely what happened.
'I do whatever I'm told, I just like writing. I still have the same agent who said, 'It's all about children's books, write something for children.' So I did. And then she said, 'Now it's crime.' So I said oh, why not?'' He shrugs. A sequel's already underway, with the protagonist, Jayne, now working in television – 'another world I know a lot about, and also full of awful people.'
Clary's sense of humour has always required a victim, he says. 'Someone to be rude about, whether it's my pianist or someone in the front row.' Growing up with his two older sisters in Teddington, south-west London, his first target was police officer father, Peter. At home, the young Clary and his mother, a probation officer, would be thick as thieves, teasing the others with a lovingly barbed running commentary.
'Me and my mother would be rude to my father, he was the set-up – but for comedy purposes, you understand,' he says. 'He was a kind man, a gentle man. I don't think he really wanted to be a policeman. He did his 25 years and retired. I don't think he liked arresting people and locking them up, that didn't thrill him at all.'
It was firmly middle-class, genteel upbringing. All Sunday lunches, camping holidays, pet guinea pigs and duties as an altar boy. The young Clary was both the parish priest's gardener and, latterly, coxswain for the local rowing club. He wrote poetry and plays, and has described himself as 'self-evidently effeminate even as a five-year-old.'
'I probably wasn't exactly what my father had in mind'
His parents were 'both quite liberal, and my father was a bit bemused by me, I think. I probably wasn't exactly what he had in mind, but there was never any 'Get out of my house' or anything like that. It was a very happy household, it was all about having a laugh.'
Clary was bright, and earned a scholarship at St Benedict's, a Catholic private school in nearby Ealing. There, he was beaten by priests and bullied by his peers, but responded by amping up his fey mannerisms and effeminate nature. With his best friend, Nicholas Reader, who was also gay, he became a quasi-school celebrity.
'Character building. Everything happens for a reason,' Clary says today. At the time, the safety and levity at home made it a sanctuary. 'School was difficult and all of that, but as long as we had a laugh in the evening, that was your sort of reward for getting through the day.'
He later found his crowd at Goldsmiths University, in south London, where he studied English and drama before starting in alternative comedy. Always dressed to the nines, often in PVC, he appeared as Gillian Pieface, and later as The Joan Collins Fan Club (the real Joan is now a friend), with his whippet mongrel, Fanny the Wonderdog, as his limelight-stealing sidekick. A TV break, on Saturday Live, came in 1987 before he got his own show, Sticky Moments.
Any sexual repression from his teenage years was made up for in his 20s. In Clary's memoir, A Young Man's Passage, he lists a non-exhaustive catalogue of some 60-odd partners, including 'Tony with low self-esteem', 'the newsreader', 'prematurely bald Adelaide boy with hairpiece', 'Sensible Ian' and 'the man from Madrid who pronounced me 'magnifico!''
Such promiscuity came with risks in the 80s, as the Aids crisis took hold. Clary was protected by a bad bout of anal warts, which put him out of action during the height of the tragedy.
'Do your readers want to know about that?' he enquires. 'Well, it's my theory, yes. I felt like I was protected by an unseen force. At a time when unsafe sex would have been a very dangerous thing to do, I was prevented from doing it due to anal warts. That's just a fact.'
Plenty of friends weren't so lucky, including Clary's boyfriend, Christopher, who died of the disease in 1991. He writes beautifully about caring for him until the end, all the while attempting to keep a comedy career going.
'I didn't want to let my boyfriend's death defeat me'
'I remember having him very ill at home in bed, with the night sweats, changing his sheets, all of that,' he recalls today. 'And then I'd have to say, 'Well, I've got to go to work now and be funny.' It was very incongruous. I think that kind of helped me, but at the same time it's a kind of denial it was happening at all.
'And then when people die, you sort of think, 'Oh, I must carry on for their sake, I must lead a good life… I didn't want any pity, I didn't want to let it defeat me or define me. I still think that now when people die.'
By the early 90s, Clary was being swept along in show business, 'not really knowing what was going on.' Sometimes there was a good reason for that.
'There's a recording I saw of a run of a show we did at the Aldwych where the first half's really slow, and the second half's really manic. I asked my friend about it and she said, 'Yes, that's because we did a joint before the first and a line before the second.'' He laughs. 'But that's what you did in the 90s, it seemed like a good idea at the time.'
That all just petered out. 'Yes, I never hit a crisis point, I was too self-aware, and lucky really. For other people it got out of hand. Besides, once you're in your 30s or 40s you start to enjoy being sober and clear-headed. That's quite a nice feeling as well. Who knew?'
He was under the influence, specifically of Rohypnol, taken during a period of depression, when he made that Norman Lamont gag in 1993. Ever the perfectionist, it still irks him that the actual punchline – 'Talk about a red box…' – was drowned out by laughter.
'It's not nice, being cancelled'
It brought the house down, but in doing so also (briefly) tore down Clary's career. The newspaper front pages declared him 'sick' and 'obscene'. A London Weekend Television executive wrote to him to ban him from live appearances. The moral outrage, despite only 12 viewer complaints, made Clary one of the earliest victims of cancel culture.
'It's not nice, being cancelled. It's not a positive thing. But as I say, everything happens for a reason and I had a nice quiet year after that.' He never dwells on what might have happened if he'd not said it. 'Oh, I'd have said something else the following year, I expect.'
Despite being a 'news junkie', he is not particularly politically active. 'But I'm an old leftie, that's where I stand.' What does he make of the current Government? 'Well, if they could lean a bit more to the left, I'd be thrilled.'
Moving to the country and growing older did nothing to shift him on the political spectrum. 'No, and my friends haven't either. I don't understand that, but people do get more right wing as they get older, don't they?'
That, or they get caught in the weeds of some issues, never to return. I wonder what Clary makes of his friend Boy George's row with JK Rowling over her views on trans people. At this he narrows his eyes. 'I'm on George's side,' he says, simply. There has, he concedes, been 'a fracture' in his generation of performers on the matter.
'I think it's important to know where you stand without bringing a load of hate on yourself. I love and support the trans community and I'm very in favour of strength in numbers for LGBTQI+. We're stronger together.'
I have rarely met anyone so sanguine and unruffled. He used to suffer from panic attacks and anxiety, but hasn't done so in years. On Desert Island Discs, his book choice was Stop Thinking, Start Living by Richard Carlson.
'It worked for me. Now, if anyone starts unloading all their misery on me, I just send them the book.' He tried therapy once but found it boring. 'Some people think you've got to deal with your childhood trauma, and that could take years, whereas I think if you just don't think about it…'
This attitude is a family trait, he says. 'We're all of a kind, really, we treat life quite lightly, and don't get knocked down by anything. It's quite healthy, but it makes you quite lightweight. If someone wants to have a serious conversation with me, well good luck, because I don't really go in for it now.
'Some people do heavy conversations all the time. Analyse their relationships every Friday… 'This is what you're doing wrong, this is how I'd like you to change…'' He shudders. 'Can't imagine doing that.' Fortunately his husband is on the same page. 'I wouldn't have married him otherwise.'
He met Mackley, who is 17 years his junior, on a yacht in Ibiza 20 years ago. A decade later, Clary announced their marriage on social media with a photograph and the line 'On Saturday he slipped his finger into my ring at last. #married.'
What would the young Clary have made of that? 'Well, he'd be amazed you can even get married,' he says, but not disappointed he decided to. 'No, promiscuous as I was, I was always looking for love, just in the wrong places.'
They'll now live out their days in Camden, he predicts. A book here, a stand-up tour there, the panto, a bit of Just A Minute with his old friend Paul Merton. 'It's enough,' he says.
Retirement, though, isn't an option. 'No. I saw Barry Humphries on his last tour, and he was still going at 89.' That's Clary's plan. A smile flickers across his face. 'Can you imagine, buggery jokes at that age?'
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