The great joy of this year’s Strictly Come Dancing, which has long had a proclivity for the well behaved and proper, has been La Voix, a bedazzled drag queen always locked and loaded with a self-aggrandising quip and a withering aside. She has injected the show with a rare feeling of comic danger – telling Tess Daly her dress looks like a bathmat; remarking upon the authenticity of Craig Revel Horwood’s hair; eagerly asking the outgoing Claudia Winkleman how and where she should submit her CV to the BBC. It Takes Two, Strictly’s televisually comatose nightly spin-off show, has only ever come alive when La Voix is a guest. Note a recent moment in which a sent-in video from a well-wishing friend, a standard trope of these reality TV sister programmes, led to La Voix expressing mock admiration for their glittering ensemble: “See, when you’re not working or as busy as I am, you’ve got time to make costumes like that.”
La Voix, the alter ego of performer Christopher Dennis, is currently matched in this strain of anarchic camp by Alan Carr over on the BBC’s other runaway smash, The Celebrity Traitors. He, too, is a gay funnyman delighting in the fruits of his own mercilessness – in keeping with the show’s trademark goth-horror showboating, Carr has become more and more winkingly evil over the course of its run, relishing his role as the most profusely sweating yet bafflingly under-the-radar traitor of all.
La Voix and Carr both exemplify a kind of comedy that once ruled over the primetime schedules of BBC One and ITV – across game shows and chat shows, both earnest and satirical – but which found itself phased out in favour of the anodyne stylings of Stephen Mulhern or Marvin and Rochelle Humes. This humour is fast, catty, a little bawdy, and always falling on the right side of mean: think Julian Clary, Mrs Merton, Dame Edna Everage or Lily Savage, where the most outrageous observations were fired out with a cheesy grin or protestation of total innocence. They dance along a fine line – puncture your targets enough and your audience gasps in shared recognition (“So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”); punch too far down and you’re Anne Robinson.
Nineties figures like these, reared in working men’s clubs and grotty comedy bars, benefited from a television industry – inspired by the provocative button-pushing of the still-nascent Channel 4 – eager for irreverence and shock in their on-camera personalities. Savage, the beehive-sporting ex-sex worker glamazon portrayed by the late Paul O’Grady, was recruited to present BBC One’s Blankety Blank solely because she wasn’t the droll, deadpan Terry Wogan or Les Dawson, whose comic rhythms had defined the quiz show’s earlier incarnations. Senior BBC executives allowed O’Grady to go off-script, vamp until the cameras stopped rolling, and express all kinds of gallows humour to unsuspecting (but eager to be slandered) ordinary people.
As a nation, we loved this sort of thing. Each one of these “characters”, whether real or unreal, became a defining figure of British TV 25 years ago – Clary, even after he caught serious flak for an infamous gag involving an outré sex act and a Tory MP, seemed to be everywhere back then, a comic with a gentle countenance but the tongue of a cobra. Why and how he, and figures like him, seemed to disappear from view is up for debate. It’s true that this kind of spiky humour can sometimes become rote for those performing it. O’Grady largely retired Lily Savage at the turn of the millennium, softening himself (but only somewhat) to become the host of long-running evening chat shows; Caroline Aherne, the late genius behind Mrs Merton, would sharpen her observational, dark-hued wit in scripted television, most famously in the howlingly funny and queasily real The Royle Family.
But it’s also true that TV got a little less ribald overall, channels swinging back from shock to safe. Commissioners still loved the principles of Lily-Savagian humour – the tussles of power; the startling final blow of a punchline – but it migrated to reality TV, where it was placed into the mouths of the volatile and unfun. Gay representation on television became a little, well, “respectable”, too – call it the Queer Eye-ification of primetime, with feather boas and disdain swapped out for cravats and politeness. RuPaul’s Drag Race got a budget and its edges sawn off; Graham Norton stopped platforming obscure fetish websites on his chat show; Dame Edna kept getting cancelled. Yet even with this dilution of barbed, acidic, “dangerous” queerness in the mainstream, queer people have still somehow ended up facing the most open hostility in the public sphere since the Eighties.
One of the rare silver linings of our current sociopolitical armageddon is that such eagerness for benign respectability – spearheaded by the well-intentioned but clearly annoying middle-class liberals running our television channels – has been tossed out the window. It’s getting worse for (almost) everyone, so why not make a ruthlessly incisive observation – humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing – that leaves Tess Daly blushing? Thank God for La Voix and Alan Carr, paradigms of crafty, bitchy elegance currently dominating the evening schedules of BBC One. They are gay powerhouses having messy, unbridled fun, in a moment where it’s never felt braver – and more necessary – to be gay, messy and unbridled. Paul O’Grady would be proud.
