I can still feel my guts churning like a cement mixer and my lungs gasping for air.
It was the aftershow party of the 1995 National TV Awards at Wembley, and the person reducing me to a howling heap as he ripped apart the household-name celebrities who frolicked around us was a little-known comedian dressed in a frock and a peroxide wig.
“If I ever turn into one of those phoney, arse-licking ****s, promise me you’ll put a bullet through my head,” Paul O’Grady asked me. I never needed to.
In the days following his death I’ve been laughing again, imagining what he would have made of some of the same celebrities he was crucifying at Wembley, now lauding him.
It only truly hit me that he was gone when Dominic Raab referred to him in the Commons as Paul Grayson, and I realised we’d never get to hear O’Grady’s acid response. It would have been gold.
I first met him backstage in a Croydon theatre when he was little known outside the drag circuit and a few stand-up appearances on Granada TV. “Why would you want to interview me? I’ve got nothing to say,” he said, then didn’t shut up for two hours.
He talked about his Irish socialist background and a father who hated the royals and Churchill so much he would rip their photos out of books and toss them on the fire. Something I reminded him of when he accepted an MBE, a decision he said he wrestled with, but accepted for the family that was still living.
Like many people who were forced to leave northern towns for work in the 1980s, he despised Margaret Thatcher and the Tories. It never left him.
Watch the 2010 clip from his Channel 4 chat show, when he rants about the effects of Tory austerity policies, calling them “b*****ds” who probably “laughed when Bambi’s mum got shot,” and you’ll grasp the essence of that fearless, principled man.
Which other chat-show host would have the balls to savage the Government in such an uncompromising way on mainstream afternoon TV?
He was basically a social worker with a heart as big as his unique comedic talent who empathised with the working class he came from because emotionally he never left them.
I’ve watched many ordinary people achieve fame and wealth only to get hung up on how much tax they’re paying or their envy of a fellow celeb’s grander mansion.
Paul O’Grady would have paid 90% tax if he thought his good fortune was being spread among those who needed it. As for a mansion, he bought one in Kent so he had enough rooms to house all the stray animals that he had adopted. It was like visiting Doctor Doolittle.
A few years ago he agreed to take part in a comedy show I was organising to save Liverpool’s Casa Bar, which he had to eventually pull out of. His only worry was he hadn’t done stand-up for 20 years and didn’t have an act.
“Just be yourself. That’s funny enough,” I told him. “B*****ks,” he replied. “I’ll think of something. I can’t fake it.”
Those words come back now, seeing the huge outpouring of love from the British public towards him, none of which is fake. You can’t fake being genuine. And, unlike most celebrities, Paul O’Grady was as genuine a person as he was a star. That’s what made him so special.
