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. His reboot of Blankety Blank repackaged the Seventies naff-fest for a new generation. He won a Bafta for the Paul O’Grady Show. He thrived as a presenter-for-all-seasons. But nobody – not even those he criticised – had it in them to dislike O’Grady. His effusiveness was such that you could only imagine that Black would have approved.Īnother presenter would have been dragged over the coals for such comments. 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). 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.Ībove all, he made sure that he had fun – and that you knew he was having fun. O’Grady, meanwhile, parlayed his profile to advocate for the LGBT community. Lily Savage brought drag culture into the mainstream. With Lily Savage, he made drag dangerous. They were camp but it was a safe sort of queerness. Before O’Grady, drag queens were figures of fun – but never political. He was incapable, almost at a genetic level, of dullness. Whatever he did, wherever he went, O’Grady – who became famous with his drag alter-ego Lily Savage – made things interesting. 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. At one point, he sat in a motorboat waving at seals. 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. Here was more stodge shovelled out to fill the schedules.īut O’Grady, who has died suddenly at age 67, made it work. Lockdowns were rolling ever onwards, everyone was miserable, and the weather was pretty grim. In the hands of many presenters, Great British Escape would have been the sorriest filler. In November 2020, during the dog days of the pandemic, Paul O’Grady hosted a travel show in which he pottered around the UK.

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