The Ironworks, Inverness,  10 November 2010

IT HAS ALL been done before, the allusions to male hens, a thousand pseudonyms for the male orgasm, but there is no doubt that Clary is the master of innuendo.  He has turned it into an art form, and his wit and charm shone through at the Ironworks.

Clary is the unlikely son of a probation officer and a policeman, so his current performance might be the outcome of the worst case of teenage rebellion ever recorded. From the start you know what is coming – he is outrageously camp and yet, despite the obscenity of its content, much of Clary’s humour is delivered with a delightful gentility.

It is almost impossible to be offended as he describes, in graphic detail, sessions of gay love making.  The main reason Clary can get away with it, and most of the time he does, is that a lot of his humour is self-deprecating.

Julian Clary

Other camp comedians on the circuit, Bruce Devlin to name one, treat the audience with an unrivalled savagery.  Somehow gay comedians can make eye-watering observations other comedians would dare not utter, or perhaps it’s just that the audience expect that from them and are more willing to tolerate it.

Clary is unrepentant in talking about his sexuality with a fearless honesty: “I knew that this was what I wanted to talk about on stage,” he explains. “There was no point being coy about it, or pretending that I wasn’t gay. That was the substance of my whole act. If you took that away, there would be nothing left.”

Clary revealed on stage that he is a bestselling novelist with titles like “A Young Man’s Passage” and “Murder Most Fab.”  Despite all the innuendo and the smut, his stage presence exudes charisma, wit and above all intelligence.  It was a joy to watch him on stage and be transported into his world of cheesy glitz and over-done eye liner.

I suppose some might castigate him and comedians of his ilke for perpetrating a homosexual stereotype, and there might be some truth in that view.  Although it may also be the case that in talking so openly about his sexuality and life in the bedroom he makes it more normal, more acceptable to a wider public.

Clary talked about a darker side to his life when he said, “The bullying was hideous and relentless, and we turned it round by making ourselves celebrities.”  Oddly it appears he never worked as a hairdresser.

I don’t think you can talk about Julian Clary without mentioning the “incident”. On live television, at an awards show, he casually mentioned that he had just been back stage fisting Norman Lamont.

This was clearly a joke because Mr Lamont’s expression hadn’t changed at all over past few minutes and, given the Chancellor’s considerable experience of shafting people, I am sure he would have noticed Clary’s intrusive hand.

This brought the tabloids, including those moral guardians, The Daily Mail, down on him like a howling pack of dogs, and forced him to take a sojourn in Australia.  His career has never really recovered.

It is the curse of the comedian that he constantly dances on an invisible tight rope that is perpetually swinging.  Audiences like stand-ups because they say things they dare not, because they show sides of the world they can hardly bare to look at, and yet when they transgress, when the mirror shatters and the splinters hit the ground there can be no forgiveness.

Would Russell Brand have been so roundly criticised if his victim had not been inextricably linked with the Fawlty Towers waiter Manuel, whose constant bullying by Basil Fawlty had already won the nation’s sympathy?

In the second half of the show Clary appeared back on stage dressed as a ring master (he just keeps the innuendo going.)  He performed a hilarious spoof clairvoyant act and even some conjuring, after luring some poor audience members up on stage, and finished the show with a glitzy musical number.

The Ironworks audience arrived expecting to revel in Clary’s delightfully smutty persona, and as always, Clary took great pleasure in rising to the occasion. (Sorry, I’ve caught a dose of innuendo)

© John Burns, 2010

Links

• The Ironworks

• Julian Clary