How Paul O’Grady dragged gay culture into the mainstream

In November 2020, during the dog days of the pandemic, Paul O’Grady hosted a travel show in which he pottered around the UK. In the hands of many presenters, Great British Escape would have been the sorriest filler. Lockdowns were rolling ever onwards, everyone was miserable, and the weather was pretty grim. Here was more stodge shovelled out to fill the schedules.

But O’Grady, who has died suddenly at age 67, made it work. He did so with an effusive mixture of charm and spikiness – that amiable personality spritzed with just enough vinegar to keep you on your toes. At one point, he sat in a motorboat waving at seals. It was a silly moment – a man in a boat waving at the wildlife – but O’Grady was so full of joie de vivre that he turned it into riveting telly.

Whatever he did, wherever he went, O’Grady – who became famous with his drag alter-ego Lily Savage – made things interesting. He was incapable, almost at a genetic level, of dullness. He also broke boundaries. Before O’Grady, drag queens were figures of fun – but never political. They were camp but it was a safe sort of queerness. With Lily Savage, he made drag dangerous.

Lily Savage brought drag culture into the mainstream. O’Grady, meanwhile, parlayed his profile to advocate for the LGBT community. He was a campaigner who made campaigning look like a hoot – and who confronted headfirst the homophobia that was still a fact of daily life for gay people through the 1990s when Lily was unleashed upon mainstream TV.

Above all, he made sure that he had fun – and that you knew he was having fun. No one else could have stepped in for Cilla Black as host of Blind Date and turned the gig into an extended love letter to Black (a dear friend). His effusiveness was such that you could only imagine that Black would have approved.

O’Grady was born in Birkenhead in 1955, the youngest child of a working-class family. He finished school aged 16, having had a daughter following a brief relationship, and moved to London where he had a job with Camden Council as a care officer working with older people.

That was during the day. At night, he became Lily Savage. This was a singular creation – the missing link between classic drag queens such as Danny La Rue and the new generation of large-than-life drag artists that would be embodied by RuPaul.

The blood of the working men’s clubs of O’Grady native Wirral flowed through the character’s veins. Savage – inspired by the maiden name of O’Grady’s mother – was perfectly at home amid the blokey bonhomie of Eighties and Nineties comedy, when the scene was boisterously becoming "the new rock'n roll". Lily's caustic humour cut through and spoke to audiences who, in many circumstances, hadn’t applauded a drag queen since going to panto as children.

A former altar boy, O’Grady had a flair for an ornate and for the camp. And Savage was the vessel into which he poured his anger about prejudices against the LGBT community (having grown up in the Seventies it was something he knew a great deal about) But he was also smart enough to be always in control of the character rather than the other way around. And when he felt that Savage had said all she needed to say, he let her go and got on with his career in presenting.

Savage may have been put out to pasture in 2004 (O’Grady says she had retired to “a convent in Brittany”). However, O’Grady, even as he ascended to the status of a national treasure, refused to mellow. When it came to politicians he rarely held back. “I loathe Cameron,” he said once. “I loathe Osborne. I’d like to see their heads on spikes on Tower Bridge.”

Another presenter would have been dragged over the coals for such comments. But nobody – not even those he criticised – had it in them to dislike O’Grady. He thrived as a presenter-for-all-seasons. He won a Bafta for the Paul O’Grady Show. His reboot of Blankety Blank repackaged the Seventies naff-fest for a new generation. Meanwhile, he became an advocate for animal rights and one of the nation’s best-known animal lovers, keeping dogs, pigs, bats and ferrets at his farm in Kent.

He continued to tread the boards and this year was appearing in a new touring production of Annie. He had time for theatre having stepped down last August from his Sunday afternoon BBC radio show. As he signed off, he observed that he had always felt he could never escape from the Radio 2 offices. Today was different. “I can run free,” he said.

But then he had always been about freedom. O’Grady was a broadcaster and a personality who made rules rather than followed them and who, as both a campaigner and also as an everyday presence in the lives of his viewers and listeners, will be missed terribly.