Julian Clary is just a one-joke camp comedian, right?
Wrong. He is in fact a much misunderstood comic, writes Dan Carrier

A Young Man’s Passage by Julian Clary
Ebury Press, £17.99

JULIAN Clary was close to death. His lungs had packed up and the only way to save him was a double transplant – something that no doctor had ever attempted and no patient had ever survived. But after hours in surgery and weeks recuperating, the nine-year-old pulled through.
But there was a problem.
He had been given a set of lungs taken from a little girl, and it made him speak in what his classmates called a girlie way. He was bullied incessantly – and so told them a lie about a major operation as an excuse as to why he had a squeaky tone in the hope he would be left alone.
But it got worse, and in his autobiography, he details the bullying he had to put up with through his formative years. And his book underlines the inherent homophobia that is still rife through out our society and the damage it causes to many people.
Julian is also a survivor. Because of his talent, loving family and a thick skin, he coped with an all-boys’ Catholic school run by sadistic monks who were as violent and bigoted as many of his peers.
His autobiography could have read like a ‘Pity Poor Me’ tragedy; the bullies that beat him, made him an outcast and dread going to school, the first love who died and who he had to nurse through his final months and the problems of celebrity and success.
But Julian Clary is far too self-suf-ficient, tough and realistic to let, as he would put it, the buggers get him down.
He doesn’t moan about his lot. He tells it like it is, and his book also reveals a wit that is sometimes lost when he appears on TV. He has, to a degree, and partly perhaps to make him more marketable to the heterosexual TV executives, become a gay man’s Benny Hill. His jokes tend to be from the Hill school of double entendres, sexual play on words. But on paper he ends the majority of paragraphs with dead pan punch lines that are terrific – “My mum was a spiritualist and my father a comedian. I’m a happy medium.”
He explains what it is like to come out: or not, in his case. His sister said to him once, when he was around 18, that if he was gay, it was fine for him to tell the family as they all loved him anyway and it wouldn’t matter. He declined and his sexuality, which is key to his working life, simply didn’t matter enough for it to be an issue for him. The book, however, is full of tales of sexual adventures and he talks easily of his desires and partners.
As he puts it, his grandmother and family came to see a show in which he cracks a joke about discovering he was gay: “It happened the other Thursday. I thought, as I was getting out the bath, what I fancy is a great, big cock up my arse.”
His family laughed – although he says he thinks his gran had her hearing aid turned off.
He writes: “My sexuality has now been well and truly demystified for them, and indeed every body else. I’ve never worried about upsetting them: they’re fairly thick skinned and we do, after all, share the same sense of humour.”
But Julian does perpetuate stereotypes that all gay people wear make up, talk in effeminate voices and mince.
This issue of trading on his sexuality for laughs is not dealt with.
Why should he? If homophobes want to generalise about gay people – and some use Clary’s show as evidence of what a gay man is all about – then that is the bigot’s problem, not Clary’s.
He now lives in Delancey Street, Camden Town, and believes it is his spiritual home, and one of the reasons for his happiness. A brief sojourn to a turreted house in Holloway coincided with some awful moments in his personal life – something he puts down to leaving NW1.
And moving to Camden was a sign he’d made it: Clary charts his career, from being a helium balloon delivery man to presenting the BBC’s Saturday night National Lottery coverage.
But his ambitions – apart from a spell as a teenager where he decided he must be a world renowned pop star – were simple.
He says: “When I was 30, I was newly famous, with a bank account swelling nicely. Since I was a teenager my ambition had been to live in Camden Town and drive a Citreon 2CV. I could now afford to do both, so I bought a flat in Albert Street, Camden Town.”
But even though he has become mainstream he was not always a media darling. When it became apparent he was going to make it big, the tabloids began sniping.
He had been doing his Joan Collins’ Fan Club show on Channel Four’s Friday Night Live. This led to him being a co-presenter on a game show called Trick Or Treat with Mike Smith. The tabloids seized on Julian’s sexuality to knock what was, he admits, quite a silly programme. My transition from late night TV to kiddies’ shows caused some consternation,” he admits.
He catalogues the way they launched themselves at him but manages to do it in good humour.
“One headline ran: ‘TV bosses wash out gay Julian’s foul mouth’.
“I’d had no dealings with the tabloids before and was bemused by all the fuss,” he admits. “Another read: ‘Outrageous drag artist Clary shocked showbiz last night when he appeared on TV wearing MAKE UP and a crushed velvet suit,’ I ask you.”
And his burgeoning career helped get homophobia out of the closet, which in turn allowed him to ridicule his adversaries. But his success coincided with personal tragedy.
He met and fell in love with Christopher – whose surname he omits – but their time together was cut short. Christopher had Aids, and Clary talks candidly about his death.
“We both knew there wasn’t much time left,” he says. “ We didn’t say it out loud. It was obvious. He coughed and slept and sweated. I was off doing TV shows leaving pills by the bed as Christopher snuggled under the duvet. I’m aware in retrospect of a kind of panic neither of us acknowledged. We just carried on from day to day and talked sometimes about going on holiday.
“I didn’t really think he could go far from hospital. His blood readings and cell counts were grim.”
His final days are carefully chronicled. He wore an oxygen mask that made it difficult for him to speak, so he wrote things down.
Getting over Christopher’s death is also given space. “His clothes stayed in the wardrobe for years,” he reveals. “Sometimes I’d lift a sleeve and get a whiff of the dead boyfriend.”
He went straight back to work, creating the show Terry and Julian with Paul Merton.
“It felt a bit disrespectful, writing buggery jokes at such a sombre time. Should I not have been at home crying and wearing black?” he wonders. But Paul Merton told him to think of one thing at a time: “At least for the hours we’re writing, you won’t be miserable.”
And he was right.
“Writing buggery jokes is the perfect therapy for the bereaved,” Clary writes. “Whenever I became slightly pensive, Paul would do something funny, like shout out of the window to the workmen on the scaffolding opposite: ‘Bert, send up my underpants will you?’”
He wanted to write a moving epitaph to his boyfriend, saying how he feels a warm glow when he thinks about him, and things along those lines. But he says he feels it’s crass – and it reveals a lot about his down to earth and accepting attitude towards life. He doesn’t wail or seek to attach blame but is realistic. He says he doesn’t want to be “the mourning homosexual secretly loving the tragedy of his bereavement, making sure he has a faraway look in his eyes at all times”.
And the epilogue goes some way to explaining his success. While he does not want to eulogise over Christopher, he is happy to when it comes to his parents.
“Their newly discovered ability to live in the moment tells me they are getting older,” he says as he dedicates a chapter to them. Now they are carefree and happy. Still together despite, or because of, all that life has made them deal with.”
This tribute makes a moving ending to a moving success story.