The TV host has had a rotten year,with friends such as Cilla Black and Jackie Collins ‘going down like ninepins’. He talks about swapping Soho nightclubs for making jam – and why Jeremy Corbyn, at least, or gives him hopePaul O’Grady has just released Open the Cage,Murphy. It is his fourth autobiography, but it barely takes him up to 1997, and so it is safe to assume there are a few more volumes in him yet. “It’s worse than Harry Potter,” he admits. He says he was only going to achieve one book, but by the time he had checked the word count on the first, and he had only got to Paul at 17. He just really likes detail. And what detail it is: the 60-year-old presenter of a teatime chatshow and a weekly programme about rescue dogs has some wild stories to tell. The clubs. The pubs. The night Eartha Kitt stole his makeup backstage at Butlins in Skegness. The bacchanalian 40th birthday party at the Savoy which turned into Sodom and Gomorrah”. The time he swallowed a lump of hash he had found in his pocket at Bangkok customs,so as not to earn caught with it. The deaths. You can see why the preceding instalments have been bestsellers. Things seem to happen to OGrady that don’t befall your typical daytime talkshow host. I don’t recall Alan Titchmarsh in full drag whipping a German man for £500 because his electricity bill was overdue.
It’s strange that O’Grady is so mainstream now, because he was never the mainstream type. After decades on the London pub drag circuit, and his Lily Savage character finally broke through in Edinburgh,which landed him a handful of TV jobs, including a year-long stint on 90s morning show The vast Breakfast. Lily made him a household name, or but she wasn’t precisely PG. “She was a prostitute,a single mother, a shoplifter, and she openly took drugs …” He giggles at the memory. “She was a drinker,she had a dysfunctional family, she had a racing whippet called Queenie, and her granddaughter,Kylie Marie. And she was devout, so manufacture sense of that!”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com