The tragically early death of the magnificent Paul O’Grady struck a blow at the national heart that’s unusual for a celebrity death. After all, this is, for most of us, the death of a stranger.
This was a man who spent much of his professional life portraying a markedly waspish and unsentimental character, and even when he became more of what we used to call a ‘family entertainer’ he was never either sugary or oily. He reflected the British, or how we’d like to see ourselves, very well – unshowy, animal-loving, regularly quite angry, but most of all not fake.
This rewriting of even the very recent past is symptomatic of a wider cultural malaise
It’s a terrible cliché, but he really did feel like a friend, which very, very few celebrities do nowadays. I first encountered him as Lily Savage on the gay scene of the 80s, and it was a delight to watch him transfer effortlessly to his immaculately entertaining TV and radio shows as himself. In an age of ‘content’ he provided companionship and spark and fellow feeling.
Among all the tributes and the sadness of recalling happy memories was one in the i, the physical remains of the Independent, which contained a couple of bizarre paragraphs. Writing of Lily Savage as if she was an actual woman, the writer told us, ‘That she was asked to front Blankety Blank in 1998, at a time when gay people didn’t even have an equal age of consent, let alone The Equality Act to stop people being fired for their sexuality, was nothing short of miraculous.’
Now, I’ve seen many peculiar things recast as giant steps in the history of gay rights, but the hosting of Blankety Blank is a new one on me. The article goes on, ‘It was a show, lest we forget, previously occupied by Les Dawson. The man who made mother-in-law jokes.’
This is a frankly bizarre interpretation of very recent events, living history so living that it feels like last Tuesday week for many of us, and commits a massive cultural howler in its reference to Les Dawson. Dawson and Lily Savage, to anyone paying the slightest attention, were very clearly in exactly the same tradition of Northern British working-class humour. They were at precisely the same level of ‘progressive’, i.e. not remotely. Les regularly performed in drag, for decades, alongside gay actor Roy Barraclough as Cissie and Ada, a loving homage to the working-class women of their youth as Savage was to O’Grady. The jokes are often the same ones.
The article continues, with reference to the occasion in 1986 when police wearing rubber gloves raided the Vauxhall Tavern while Lily Savage was on stage, leading him to deliver the immortal quip ‘Have you come to do the washing up?’. ‘Nothing would stop a talent that huge. Not the police, and not the pale, male and stale television executives that would never have dreamt of putting a drag queen on teatime telly until it became impossible to resist Lily.’
This seems to be coming from a parallel universe. At first I assumed the writer Patrick Strudwick must be about 16, but a quick google tells me he is in fact 46. What was he watching all those years? Camp men and drag queens were never off teatime telly in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and they were loved, the comic heart of the nation. Larry Grayson, Kenny Everett, Stanley Baxter, Kenneth Williams, John Inman, Dame Edna Everage – that’s just for starters. I could fill the rest of this article just listing all the names. There are less of them on TV now. For goodness sakes, we had Divine on teatime telly forty years ago, and nobody turned a hair.
And how the TV executives of the 1970s and 1980s – locked as they were in permanent combat with the Conservative party for being louchely liberal and fiercely feminist – would scream with laughter at being recast in 2023 as members of an antediluvian establishment. The percentage of lesbians and gay men in the production of TV was legendarily high and renowned for being so at the time; whenever you see a TV producer or director portrayed on TV in those days, they are either a big butch lady or a fearsomely acid fellow with a clipboard.
I think this misremembering and misrepresentation of 20th century TV, which cuts across people, to be fair, mostly much younger than Strudwick, is down to what we see from those days on clips shows. The likes of On The Buses, Love Thy Neighbour and The Black And White Minstrel Show, chosen for their shock value, and the ‘sexy’ genre stuff, film series that people still watch like Department S or The Persuaders (though even those included very camp men among their leads).
Younger people have no idea that much of the bread-and-butter TV of that time was socially concerned, clearly left wing and ‘swinging’. Play For Today, Take Three Girls, Rock Follies, Gangsters, Ken Loach – a huge swathe of the past as it actually was has been effaced.
A friend on Twitter told me recently that a youngster of her acquaintance had been watching The Golden Girls and was taken aback by ‘how progressive it was for its time’. Goodness me, do these kids think 1990 was 1890?
Yes, this rewriting of even the very recent past is hilarious, on one level. But it is symptomatic of a wider cultural malaise, the 21st century young progressive’s permanent Year Zero, in which everything and everybody before about six months ago was a hate crime, until they came riding to the rescue with their rainbow lanyards and their 2:2s from the University of Winchester.
This is ironic, coming from people that never stop with their various identity-centred History Months. Here’s a tip for them. Learn some history.
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