How Paul O’Grady won our hearts with his drag alter ego Lily Savage

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On a Saturday night time in January 1987, Paul O’Grady was on stage on the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. He was performing as his drag alter ego Lily Savage, the Scouse intercourse employee with an acid tongue and a towering blonde wig. Then the police burst in: the raid was ostensibly a part of a crackdown on amyl nitrate, or poppers, however was additionally seen as an try and intimidate the homosexual neighborhood. Aids panic was at its top, and the officers all wore rubber gloves to keep away from touching the group. “It looks like we’ve got help with the washing up,” O’Grady quipped.

There are few showbiz careers that handle to embody an arrest on the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and heartwarming teatime TV reveals about rescue canine. But Paul O’Grady, who gave his “real name” to the desk sergeant on the police station that night time as “Lily Veronica Mae Savage”, did simply that – and by no means misplaced his subversive edge.

A yr on from O’Grady’s loss of life on the age of 67, ITV’s new documentary The Life and Death of Lily Savage charts how his drag persona emerged towards the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, Section 28 (the infamous laws banning native authorities from “the promotion of homosexuality”) and the Aids disaster. It then explores how Lily took on the mainstream – earlier than O’Grady finally retired his character on the top of her reputation, solely to forge an leisure profession in his personal proper. “The story is from rebel to national treasure, really,” says Sam Anthony, the documentary’s director. “That’s quite a journey, and it didn’t take him that long to do.”

O’Grady was “a great talker”, the director notes, so Anthony wished to discover a method for his phrases, and wit, to type the spine of the documentary. Although O’Grady launched 4 totally different autobiographies, he by no means recorded audio variations, that means that Anthony needed to embark on “a bit of a detective mission”. “I basically tried to find every single interview he’d ever done, podcasts, news interviews, stuff like that, and then tried to build a structure out of the things that he actually said himself,” he explains.

The documentary begins in Birkenhead on the Wirral, the place O’Grady was born in 1955, to “very Catholic” mother and father. From a younger age, he was drawn to the “excitement” of Liverpool, the town he’d see from throughout the river Mersey. “As a child, it was my personal little Camelot, nothing else existed,” we hear him clarify within the movie. The spirited girls he grew up with would finally present him with inspiration for Lily, not least his Auntie Chrissie, a glamorous bus conductor with a no-messing perspective (“She came across as quite hard-bitten, but […] she was daft as a brush,” he later informed Desert Island Discs). “He genuinely loved working-class women,” Anthony says. “He loved women of a certain age, ‘difficult women’.”

When O’Grady finally moved to London in his twenties, he labored as a “peripatetic care officer” (or, as he put it, a “bizarre Mary Poppins”) for Camden Council: “If a single mother had to go to hospital, I’d move in and look after her kids so they didn’t have to go into care,” he later recalled to The Independent. It was an expertise that “helped with his sense of social justice”, Anthony says. He noticed the impression of cuts to social care first hand, and by no means forgot it: see his barnstorming speech on Paul O’Grady Live in 2010, when he ripped into the Tory authorities’s austerity price range. “Bastards,” he hissed, presumably giving his producers an anxiousness assault within the course of.

Around the identical time as working for the council, he made his debut as Lily Savage at The Black Cap, Camden’s legendary homosexual pub. The character appeared to emerge nearly absolutely fashioned (no shock, provided that O’Grady had been making his mates snort with his impressions of Scouse housewives for years). Instead of choosing all-out, OTT glamour, Lily had “her roots showing and a rip in her tights”, we hear O’Grady recall. Care employee by day, drag queen by night time: the previous ended up informing the latter, Anthony suggests. “The character of Lily is definitely referencing some of those mums from troubled backgrounds, doing whatever it took to survive, that kind of thing,” he says.

Her sense of humour was, properly, savage: “scurrilous and filthy and real”, as Graham Norton, one in all The Life and Death of Lily Savage’s many celeb speaking heads, places it. As the Eighties went on, Lily landed a residency on the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, and have become a fixture on the capital’s drag scene. “[Lily] got away with things that everyone else would like to say but didn’t dare,” Gaby Roslin tells me. The presenter, who additionally options within the documentary, was an excellent good friend of O’Grady, and met him whereas engaged on The Big Breakfast within the Nineties. But, she says, the act was “never cruel” – O’Grady (or “Sav”, as Roslin nonetheless calls him) didn’t punch down. “Lily could say things and could be really cutting. But there was nothing unkind about Paul.”

And Lily had lots to rail towards. “There was a miners’ strike going on, there was Section 28 going on for the gay community,” Anthony says. “There was a lot to be cross about, and [O’Grady] was very angry about a lot of stuff.” The Aids disaster would additionally forged a shadow. “I was either at hospitals or at funerals for two or three years,” O’Grady says within the movie, whereas mates recall how he would go to mates in character as Lily, doing ward rounds, asking sufferers whether or not they wished “red or white [wine]” from the trolley.

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Anecdotes like these imply that, even in these sadder moments, The Life and Death of Lily Savage is stuffed with color. And the documentary has an particularly private dimension because of the involvement of O’Grady’s daughter Sharyn Mousley, who had by no means beforehand spoken about her father on digicam. Her mom Diane was a good friend and colleague of O’Grady, who was simply 18 when Mousley was born; “People might wonder how a gay man managed to father a daughter,” he later joked, “but I was a highly promiscuous teenager.”

Anthony went to go to Mousley in the course of the analysis course of. “We really got on,” he tells me. “Then I plucked up the courage to ask her, ‘Look, do you think you might ever actually talk to us and be in the programme?’ And she said yes, which was great, and I think it really does make all the difference [to the film]”. Her tales are a riot, from the time O’Grady turned up and began respiratory hearth at her seventh party, to her recollections of going to the retailers to choose up a couple of packs of tights for her dad (“I’d be like, ‘Have you got tan and black?’”).

The Nineties noticed Lily break into the mainstream, incomes a Perrier Award nomination on the Edinburgh Fringe and touchdown a spot as an interviewer on The Big Breakfast. “Nobody batted an eyelid that there was a drag queen on breakfast telly, and so nobody should,” Roslin says. “That was before its time. It was just completely normal. I can’t remember anybody coming up to me and saying ‘What is a drag queen doing on TV?’” The early begins, although, didn’t essentially go well with O’Grady. “There was a lot of: ‘Gab, Gab, Gab, oh my God, what time is it?’” Roslin laughs, quickly adopting a gruff Scouse accent (O’Grady’s fondness for an excellent previous moan turns into a operating joke within the documentary).

“I’m like a bouncing child when I get up early, and he’d be like, ‘Oh, shut up Gaby,’” she provides. “But I think that’s why we got on so well – I could take the piss out of him too.” And his kindness shines by way of in one other story that Roslin tells. “When my mum died [in 1997], he rang me every afternoon for two weeks,” she says. “It was in the days of answer phones, and he left a message every day. He’d say ‘don’t pick up the phone’ and he’d tell me a joke or he’d tell me about his day. And at the end of the two weeks, he said ‘Now, if you feel like talking, you know where I am.’ That’s a true friend.”

By the early Noughties, Lily was a TV fixture, presiding over primetime reveals reminiscent of Blankety Blank – and there are many anarchic outtakes from the sport present featured within the documentary. But in 2004, O’Grady all of a sudden determined to retire his alter ego: her final look could be an interview on Parkinson. O’Grady had acquired fed up with the dressing up, plus, Anthony suggests, Lily was a personality who was “very much of her moment”, a product of the Eighties and Nineties. O’Grady additionally wished to carve out a TV profession as Paul O’Grady. “I think the film is partly about this idea that sometimes you have to be somebody else first, in order to be yourself,” Anthony suggests. “He needed Lily in order to get to a point where he could actually just be himself [on TV].”

The public, in fact, warmed to the actual O’Grady fairly rapidly. He’d go on to helm chat reveals on ITV and Channel 4, spotlight the work of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home in For the Love of Dogs, and discover the world on journey programmes (a priceless clip from one in all them seems within the documentary, exhibiting O’Grady moaning about having spent an hour looking for the bathroom in his huge resort room). “It’s extraordinary that he managed to have these two obviously linked but quite separate careers,” says Anthony. “He risked everything, didn’t really care what the consequences were [when he] gave up Lily, then had an even more successful career after that.”

Even as he was embraced by the institution – in 2022 he filmed a particular episode of For The Love of Dogs with Queen Camilla – he remained “a rebel at heart”, Anthony suggests, and it was essential for the movie to mirror that. “The reason why we put the rabble-rousing clips from Paul O’Grady Live [where he rails against the Conservatives] is that that bit of Paul was still in there somewhere. He could go and do dog shows, meet Camilla, be given an OBE and all that kind of thing, but still be the same person, more or less.”

Anthony hopes that, by charting Lily and O’Grady’s rise and rise, his documentary will present “the real progress that we’ve made in this country in terms of visibility of LGBTQ people and understanding of gay rights”. TV stars like O’Grady, he provides, helped to “normalise a lot of the acceptance that we all take for granted now”, and his outstanding profession additionally tells “a more serious story” about “how far gay people have come in the last 40 years, from pariah [status] to completely and totally mainstream. It’s quite an amazing transformation just in one generation, really”. Not dangerous for a “blonde bombsite” from Birkenhead.

‘The Life and Death of Lily Savage’ is on ITV1 and ITVX on Friday 29 March at 9pm