Paul O’Grady took the long way back from his cousin’s funeral to see the house where he grew up. At home in Kent, he keeps a metaphorical suitcase under the bed (I think those are the ones with wheels) just in case his showbiz bubble pops and he has to run back to Birkenhead, to this damp little house built on a former quarry, where his auntie would take a bucket upstairs for a “whore’s wash”, and they had an outside toilet until he was nine. A woman approached as he got out of the car and said: “Aren’t you Paul O’Grady?” And he looked up at the house, and he said: “I used to be.”
I could happily have sat in this hotel room and listened to O’Grady talk till midnight, the window cracked open on to central London in case he needed another fag. He’s 61, elegant in a slim blazer, voice like broken biscuits, and currently on his fifth life. I count them.
The youngest child in a working-class family, he left school at 16 and, following a brief affair, had a daughter a year later. That’s one. After three years working at a home for disabled and abused children he moved to London, working for Camden council as a peripatetic care officer by day (life two) and on the stage in drag at night. Lily Savage debuted in 1978, a single mother and sometime prostitute in a wig the size of the Shard, a character based loosely on his beloved aunt. Three. When O’Grady was compering at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, his dressing room became a sort of confessional booth for his fellow performers; boys would sit at Lily’s feet and talk about pain. These were the Aids years, when he was seeing his friends turn into ghosts. An ex-altar boy, O’Grady lit candles for the dead – by the 90s it must have felt like he was exiting a burning building. Visiting his friend Chrissie in hospital (later, he’d haul Lily’s slap into the hospice to make Chrissie up for the coffin) he bumped into a fan dancer he knew from the clubs. This boy told him fans weren’t fashionable any more, “And I said: ‘What is?’ And he said: ‘Dying.’”
When Lily was nominated for a Perrier award in 1991, she graduated to telly, taking over from Paula Yates on The Big Breakfast. At the time, the writer Adam Mars-Jones said Paul O’Grady had found “a way of talking about deprivation through the excesses of Lily’s character. He is obsessed with the world as it is – but maybe he can only do this by stepping outside himself, and into Lily Savage.” This was his fourth life, one in the spotlight, and on the back of a thriving career in white stilettos (for a while Lily was the legs of Pretty Polly), O’Grady found a side hustle playing himself. In 2000, he began to front prime time documentaries, focusing on his love of animals, and became so mainstream that as well as teatime chat shows, he was given a programme on Radio 2. Four years later, the character of Lily was retired to “a convent in Brittany”, and he started playing Paul O’Grady full-time. In this, his fifth life, he started writing it all down, and seemingly never stopped. The fourth volume of his memoirs (all have been bestsellers) ends as today’s career begins.
And in the cracks between are enough stories to cobble together at least another life or three. Memories of the prostitutes he knew who lived on the ships in Liverpool, of Jimmy Savile visiting the children’s home he worked at, of his two major heart attacks, and the death in 2005, two days before O’Grady’s 50th birthday, of his long-term manager and boyfriend Brendan Murphy from brain cancer. Since quitting Lily, and picking up a Bafta and an MBE, O’Grady has become something of a national treasure. He wrinkles his nose: “Oh, what a terrible phrase. That wasn’t planned. One day I thought: I can’t do this any more. I hated putting make-up on. Lipstick disgusts me. But mainly I hated that I could never say exactly what I thought. It always had to be warped through Lily. So I was like a boil ready to burst. Writing became an obsession. Telly or radio on full belt, I write at night when the dogs are asleep. Though two of them are epileptic, so I might have to stop for a fit.” Although he tells his life story like a comedy routine, it’s pitted with melancholy, and pauses, and the odd story about one of his six pet pigs.
We’re meeting to talk about Blind Date, the show fronted by Cilla Black for almost two decades. When Channel 5 first approached him, he said no immediately. “It was synonymous with her, wasn’t it?” They’d been best friends – O’Grady read the eulogy at her funeral, including a story about Cilla getting wedged in a window having lost her keys. “When the neighbours came out she shouted, ‘Surprise surprise!’” Cilla’s son made him change his mind, saying he was the only replacement she’d approve of. Still, “When we did the first recording it felt wrong. I heard the music, and it felt like it shouldn’t be me.” He sighs at the memory of Cilla. “After Bobby [Willis, her husband] died, she said she’d been sent a guardian angel, except with two hooves and a tail. Oh, I miss her. We’d speak every day, and go away together three times a year. I never liked Barbados, never told her that, just went to be with her. Paps everywhere, taking the most terrible photos of us coming out of supermarkets. She was so funny though. I’d be self-harming to try and stop laughing.” When he’s talking about somebody he has lost, he looks away, out towards the traffic.
Blind Date in an age of Tinder is a confusing proposition. “I know! The contestants – physically, they’ve got their act together [he mimes a cheery kind of swagger], but mentally they haven’t. People today are scared of relationships. Of being hurt.” He’s been with his partner, a former ballet dancer, since 2006 – they met through Murphy, who he was with for 25 years. “Murphy and I used to fight, proper punch-ups. We’d fight in the green room of the BBC. And that was love. When I was ill, I wasn’t bothered about myself, I was upset at what he was going through. Then, later, nursing him, seeing such a strong man lose the power of speech... He died in six weeks – the worst weeks of my life.” He touches Murphy’s Claddagh ring on his wedding finger. “And caring for him was so... frustrating. I went into the hospital at one point and offered £100 for a urine bottle, but they couldn’t give me one.” Not a pot to piss in. “That’s why I’m so obsessed with carers – you’re just left to get on with it. The isolation, the loneliness, the fear. It does permanent damage.” His eyes cloud slightly. “I went quieter after Murphy died.”
There is a sort of matter-of-fact sadness to O’Grady, one informed by decades of caring. It’s a skill he learned in childhood, where he was milking cows by the age of six. It feels as though it’s the warmth and comedy, the “glorious banter” he was surrounded with as a boy that meant he was able to deal with so much death, and still keep on living well. “Friends die, you get on with it. I didn’t take time for myself, no. Counselling always seemed like a sign of weakness.” Even after working in social services? “My training showed me such death and devastation. When you talk to someone who’s homeless they’ll tell you: ‘Last year I had a house, a family.’ And yet today they’re anonymous, and it could happen to us. To me.”
Although it wouldn’t be such a bad lot, the way he tells it, to be packed off back to Birkenhead, a place he uses as a fond punchline. “That’s because it’s important to talk about class. Back then everything was in black and white. When we finally got a colour telly, my mum wouldn’t let us watch old films in case the neighbours saw and thought we still had an old TV.” He describes himself as a person who will never trust a microwave; if he can’t boil in it, he’s not interested. “We don’t go to doctors in my family, because we don’t want to make a fuss. So my sister’s in hospital at the moment with fluid on her heart and lungs. We were cursed in our family, with hearts.” He puts his head to the side like one of his pet owls, the one responsible for pecking him affectionately until he bleeds – he’s on blood thinners now, since the heart attacks. “When I was in hospital in intensive care, they wheeled in the telly and I was on the news. I said to them, ‘Have I died?’”
O’Grady is a rare thing on British TV – a mainstream entertainer who is vocal about his politics. More than vocal, livid. “I loathe Cameron,” he said once, “I loathe Osborne. I’d like to see their heads on spikes on Tower Bridge.” He is no less angry today. “This government cutting disability benefits – it’s criminal. I know from being in social services myself how important that £30 is.” Working for Camden council in the 70s, he saw the effect of cuts up close. “And you never finish the job. You go back after work with your two-bar fire. It should’ve got better, but it’s got worse, much worse. We don’t respect the elderly and we don’t look after the disabled. We pretend to. Carers are the neglected souls. We leave them alone.”
His voice rises to an almost Lily level, an angry boom. “I remember going in to do respite care for a man with Alzheimer’s while his wife took a break. He’d get me in a headlock when I’d put his dinner down, and later he’d have lucid moments, which were heartbreaking, because then he’d apologise.” Suddenly O’Grady cackles. “I’d sleep next to his bed, and one night I woke up warm, because he was weeing on me! ‘Are you nervous going on stage?’ they used to say. Are you joking! I was a care worker in Camden Town. This is nothing!”
I have a flash of O’Grady and his six pigs campaigning through Tory Kent, neighbours ducking behind the sofa as he approaches. “Do you know what I hate?” he asks suddenly. “I hate this ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ business.” Why? “I’m scared for the future, I’m scared of global warming, I’m scared for my grandkids, I’m scared there’ll be no elephants in eight years, I’m worried about becoming an isolated island when we come out of the EU. I’ve stopped watching the news – I can’t see any more kids being blown up in Syria.” A pause. “I mean, I watch Meridian Tonight of course, because that’s fabulous.” A sip of tea. “But if you say anything about Brexit today people tell you you’re a traitor. Those that didn’t vote for it are meant to just shut up. No! I like to tackle things. Don’t tell me to keep calm.” A prim snort.
He raises his chin now, a gesture of grand defiance. Which is basically the pose he’s struck his whole career – he was “banned” from The One Show after describing the stars of documentary series Benefits Street as “sacrificial lambs”; he quit his talk show saying the celebrities became so dull they were like “relatives you felt obliged to visit”. In less public gestures of defiance, he refused to wear a mask and gloves when visiting the Aids wards. He contextualises the changes he’s seen through a dark lens of illness.
“Same sex marriage is great, because of the security it gives. In the Aids period, families who’d never come near their son would be in to clear the flat and throw out the partner of 20 years. There was so much fear. Hospitals made it look like a crime scene, and the Sun with that vile Kelvin MacKenzie whipping up hatred.” His lips curl as if just saying his name tastes bitter. “People say it was like a war, but it was worse. In a war there’s a common bond, but with Aids you couldn’t tell someone on the bus you were going to meet a friend in hospital, the bus would empty.”
He refuses to judge the younger gay generation for the hedonism he now hears about secondhand, the drugs, the sex. “I admire the younger gays now. They’re far more confident and canny than we were. Gay boys today choose to forget about those days and move on, and I don’t blame them. My auntie used to say: ‘Remember the past but don’t live in it.’ Except, for me everything seems rosier in retrospect. The Vauxhall Tavern was our village hall.” With all the weddings and deaths that implies. “Now it’s all casual sex on apps, which means you miss out on the social side of the scene. It wasn’t about taking drugs off the internet and going for a fortnight – it was a couple of pints of cider and a dance.” It sounds like the Blind Date daters (with LGBT contestants appearing for the first time) could learn a lot from their host. “God, don’t look at me as a role model, look at me as a warning.” He leans back in his chair and for a second I see Savage. “Me? I’m just the burnt-out wreck of a once glorious disco.”
Blind Date is on Channel 5 later this month
