'I wonder how my child might have ended up'

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11 April 2012

Julian Clary is admiring his new silver deck shoes, a pair of pumps so shiny he can almost see his still-sharp, lightly dusted cheekbones in their uppers. They are dancing shoes, glitter-ball shoes, although, at 48, he does not "do" the gay nightclub scene any more. "Ooh, no. You'd have to pay me," he declares. "I've gone right off that. I loved being drunk and I loved taking drugs, but I choose not to do it any more."

Instead he goes to his country house in Kent and romps over the Romney Marshes with his (much younger) boyfriend, listening to the sound of sportsmen shooting pheasant in the distance. "Well, I presume that's what they're shooting. Are there any stags in Kent?"

You can take the boy out of the city, but whether you can take London - specifically Camden - out of Clary is quite another matter. Yet there's no question his life has undergone a seismic shift in the past few years, and that public attitudes towards his shtick have, too. The world is much changed, you feel, when Julian Clary, king of the double entendre, whose act was once laden with smut, innuendo and explicit gay sex jokes, gets his own series on CBBC, as he did earlier this year. (The programme was The Underdog Show, in which children put homeless dogs through their paces and the mutts were eventually re-homed. "I did have to hold back on the buggery jokes a bit," he quips.)

But what's an artiste to do when his outrageous act no longer outrages? With his TV career seemingly on the wane, Clary has written a novel. Murder Most Fab, halfthriller, half-chick lit, comes from the Ben Elton school of implausible plot twists and wafer-thin characterisation, but is jolly and dirty and pacy - a read for the Tube or beach. We agree to call it "dick lit", because of its large, varied quantities of gay sex ( passionate, paid for, violent, kinky: Clary has a vivid sexual imagination, if nothing else).

It is set partly within the TV industry, and specifically within the light entertainment departments Clary once bestrode like Jonathan Ross in sequins, with shows like Sticky Moments in the late 1980s; Terry and Julian, co-written with Paul Merton; and comfier, more mainstream stuff on the National Lottery programme and the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing.

Yet the novel's portrait of that industry is not sympathetic: the minions are shallow, the executives vain, and the talent is eventually exploited. Was that his experience?

"Yes, it was," he agrees readily. "While you're doing a show that's going well, everyone is charming and lovely. But then if it goes wrong, or if the show is going to be discontinued ... I've been around long enough now to understand what happens, but in my early days I really did believe these TV people were my friends and that we all cared equally about the same thing, but actually they don't. They're all on to the next thing in a flash. It's a very cut-throat business."

So the talent gets spat out? Clary narrows his eyes at me. "I'm not saying I've been spat out. I just think TV is full of ambitious people who are rather cold behind the eyes." He has "one or two" TV projects in the pipeline, he says - including a second series of kids and dogs - but won't elaborate in case they don't happen. It is fair to say he is no longer fighting off offers.

Perhaps Clary is a deeply serious man in private, but publicly, for the most part, his tone is relentlessly light, playful, frivolous. This makes him very good company, of course, but hard to pin down. His exhibitionism seems to co-exist, indeed, with a very English, rather suburban coyness. When I ask about his boyfriend, he gets rather shy and queeny, and sarcastic. Have they been seeing each other long? "Ooh, far too long."

But really, how long? "Well, a few years now." Do they live together? "Ooh, no. No. I'd very quickly tire of anyone actually living with me." They met on Ibiza, where Ian, who's 30, was working and Clary was on holiday. What's he like, then? "He's very clean-living. He wears a halo. He doesn't drink, smoke, take drugs. He barely breathes." And all of a sudden, Clary is starting to sound like Kenneth Williams. The idea of marriage intrigues him, you sense, but he claims that the "heaviness" of it - as a contract between two people and as a symbol of gay civil rights - makes him uncomfortable. "I don't think we'll get married because I'm much richer [than Ian] and if it went wrong he'd want all my money," he says smoothly. "Actually, I think I lead my life too flippantly to engage in anything like that ... You've really got to be sure it's what you want. And I don't want it." He laughs suddenly, embarrassed by his own vehemence. He would have loved children, though, and oddly - despite the self-confessed frivolity of his London lifestyle - would have made a good family man, you feel. "When I was about 40, I did suddenly think, oh dear, I'm not going to have children. And I looked into all sorts of possibilities, including adoption and lesbian friends with turkey basters. I got quite close actually, with a friend who was on tour with me in Australia. We'd worked everything out ..." He stops, aware that he's ventured onto too-serious territory - and swerves back to the safer joke. "But it would have meant masturbating in Brisbane, so that was out of the question."

Later, he says he got a girl pregnant when he was 21, and that he sometimes wonders what that child would be doing now had they kept it. "It would be 27, wouldn't it? Probably working in the City and playing rugby."

It's strange, of course, to think of Clary indulging in heterosexual behaviour at all. He grew up in Teddington, Middlesex, the child of liberal parents - mum, to whom he's very close, a probation officer, and dad a policeman - who provided very little to rebel against at home. But his repressive Catholic public school, St Benedict's in Ealing, was a different matter; and, in retrospect, he sees the roots of his later outrageous stage act germinating in his subconscious in the classroom.

"I had a vile time there. I was very bullied and victimised and beaten up, and I think that was my prime motivation for everything that followed, rather pathetically perhaps. I decided to be absolutely uncompromising. The things I was victimised for - my gayness and effeminacy - would become assets. I would turn them around." But that surely required great determination and self-belief ? "Ooh, I don't know about that. I've only realised all this with hindsight, but subconsciously I'm sure that was what I was doing. I knew I wanted to be famous. I thought I was going to be a pop star or an actor. I had to get that status somehow."

The girlfriend phase quickly passed, and after studying drama at Goldsmiths, Clary took to the alternative cabaret circuit as The Joan Collins Fan Club, with the muchloved Fanny the Wonder Dog, also his co-star on those first TV appearances. It's easy to forget the hostility with which Clary's act was greeted when it first hit the small screen. When he wrote his autobiography three years ago, he sifted through his old press cuttings and discovered dozens of bilious headlines: "A lot genuinely said: 'Get this gay off our screens!' Because I was gay, it was enough reason to call for my removal and say very rude things about me. Well, of course, you wouldn't get away with that today."

Despite the press response, Clary was immensely popular; and will surely go down in TV history as one of the last taboo-busters, whose material paved the way for sketches like The Only Gay in the Village and shows like So Graham Norton. Yet he does not see himself as a trailblazer. "I'd love to say yes, that's exactly what I was, but at the time I wasn't thinking like that at all. I was just having a high old time and seeing how far I could push it. I always did enjoy outraging people and it was quite easy to do in Thatcher's Britain."

It was in 1993 that, famously, he pushed it too far. At the British Comedy Awards, Clary made an unwise joke about the then-Chancellor Norman Lamont (it had the word "fisting" in it), and his TV career suffered brief, but harsh, consequences as a result. In his memoir, Clary describes that night in the context of a lengthy bout of depression; the day before he had turned up on his parents' house and burst into tears on the doorstep. At the time, he was prescribed Prozac and had therapy, both of which helped.

Has he suffered since? "Not for a while. I like to think it won't happen again. I seem to have sorted things out in my mind. I mean, if I still wanted to go out and pick up 25-year-olds, I think that would cause me to be depressed ... All the reasons for it were about being young, I think, and having such a lot to worry about. There are so many things you want to achieve and you might not achieve; such a lot to make you feel insecure. Most of the things I wanted to do, I've done. I've ticked them off and no one can take them away.

"I've sort of learned to live in the moment, too, and also I'm very grateful to be here. So many people aren't - friends and lovers and so on. It's really up to those who are still here to get on with it." In February this year, his pianist, Russell Churney, died of cancer; and some, of course, have died from Aids, including a long-term boyfriend, Christopher, with whom he did live, in 1991.

Clary admits, however, that he does dwell in some dark places - he has a penchant for true crime books, and his novel's serialkilling anti-hero is himself a little noirish. He's also convinced that his drug use did not help a natural inclination towards paranoia. He was a heavy user, at one point taking up to three grams of cocaine a day. "It was what you did in the Eighties in the circles in which I was mixing. We didn't think about the consequences, of course. I remember getting exhausted and going to an acupuncturist who asked me whether I'd had any drugs in the past fortnight. And I said, 'Oh yes, I've had cocaine, speed, temazepam, dope.' And she said, 'Oh well, that's why you're exhausted,' and I said, 'Really? Don't be silly.' It was a very Judy Garland era in my life. All uppers and downers, inners and outers."

He's knocked that on the head now, as he has, happily, a tendency towards dysfunctional relationships. "Oh, I had a series of disastrous boyfriends! One after the other, and they all caused so much angst. I found it such a drain on my energy. Well, they weren't right. They had to go."

Now he has Ian, of course, and despite his reluctance to make it official, he can just about see them growing old together down in Kent. "I moved to the country for the solitude. I don't even live in a village, I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't want to mix and mingle and bond with anyone really. I might keep a gun to shoot an intruder if he comes up the pathway." Yet it's telling, I think, that despite buying a large oak desk and installing it by a window in his cottage, fully intending to craft his novel in the rural quiet, Clary actually found it easier to write at home in Camden, "with Jeremy Kyle on in the background and the phone constantly ringing".

In some ways, as he approaches his half-century, he is rather stuck in the "middle of nowhere" - no longer shocking, yet not quite Dale Winton; tired of city nightlife, yet repelled by the green welly brigade; admiring of gay civil partnerships, yet unwilling to commit. But there's no danger he'll forsake London altogether. After all, you can't buy a decent pair of silver shoes in Kent.

Murder Most Fab is published on 16 August by Ebury Press, £16.99.

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