Dickie is a drag queen – but not a very good one. For a start, he finds it impossible to get his eyebrows right: they’re usually scrawled haphazardly across the upper reaches of his forehead. And while his every utterance comes suffused with bitchy energy, he flounders during any actual war-of-wits. What Dickie does have, however, is a ridiculously inflated sense of self-worth: in the grand tradition of sitcom monsters, his three defining personality traits are vanity, delusion and a spectacular dearth of talent. When his boyfriend decides he’s had enough of this “selfish, egotistical prick”, Dickie’s impulse is to soften his heart with a repulsively flat rendition of Make You Feel My Love, which is cut short when he is hit by a car. Needless to say, he doesn’t get his man back.
Dickie would probably like to think he is the star of Smoggie Queens – the brainchild of comedian Phil Dunning, who plays him – but he’s not; this Middlesbrough-set sitcom (Smoggie is a nickname for someone from the area) is very much an ensemble piece. In fact, that’s the whole point: the show’s primary theme is “chosen family” – a group of friends that are a staple of LGBTQ+ communities. Dickie’s clan includes kindly middle-aged drag queen Mam (played by a masterfully disguised Mark Benton; I gasped when I saw his name on the credits), stony-faced wannabe singer Sal, token heterosexual Lucinda and naive newbie Stewart, whose youth is taken as an act of outright hostility by the ageing Dickie.
