Paul O’Grady’s death came as a huge shock. If you didn’t feel that at the time, you almost certainly did during For the Love of Paul O’Grady, ITV’s tribute to the late comedian. The most scattershot, breakneck, flung-together hour of television you may ever watch, the show was, quite frankly, all over the place. It was unevenly structured, oddly paced and contained a bizarre framing device, in which edit points were covered with footage of dogs watching a television, one of whom posed mournfully next to a tissue box, making the whole thing look like an especially macabre canine-based obituary episode of Gogglebox. Clearly, ITV didn’t know this was coming any more than we did.
So with that in mind, it’s all the more remarkable that the show was as moving as it was. What beat through every frame was the sheer strength of feeling that O’Grady inspired, in his friends, colleagues and fans alike. I am deliberately trying to avoid using the word “love” here, because that doesn’t seem quite right. This was a man for whom a huge spectrum of people felt tangible affinity. They felt as if he belonged to them and them alone.
You knew this already, of course, because – even if you somehow knew nothing of O’Grady before his death – you will have seen the slightly tedious “But was he woke?” debates that raged online after his death. To some, his sharp and sometimes indiscriminate wit was proof of his bone-deep unwokeness. To others, the fact that he was a drag queen who came to prominence during the Aids crisis while keeping up his day job as a social worker was proof of the exact opposite.
But the ownership people felt over him stretched far beyond this – a fact that reflects the restlessness of his career. As Lily Savage, he grew a huge and enthusiastic gay audience. When he ditched Lily and carved out an identity under his own name, he was embraced by the mainstream. In later years, as he concentrated on his animal documentaries and charity work, a whole new swathe of people fell for him. My mum, God bless her, had a crush on him. I once had an argument with an ex-girlfriend about him, because she was from where he was from, and I was from where he moved to, and we both wanted to claim him as our own. That doesn’t happen with just anyone.
In truth – perhaps understandably, given that this was an ITV show – For the Love of Paul O’Grady focused a little too much on the animal work. Almost half of the show’s runtime was given over to the last decade of his life, during which he made a ton of shows about dogs. And while they were warm and heartfelt and sincere, they lacked the blistering, flame-thrower qualities of his work as Savage.
Savage got plenty of airtime in the first segment of the programme and the old clips still bristled with furious energy, three decades on. You forget what a sensation Savage was in her time, a leopardskin cruise missile who could reduce audiences to rubble without even trying. As Savage, O’Grady presented The Big Breakfast. He hosted Blankety Blank. He was the face of Pretty Polly tights. It’s hard to imagine such a thing happening now, isn’t it?
This didn’t leave a lot of time for what might qualify as O’Grady’s best work. His daytime TV programme, The Paul O’Grady show, came at a time when broadcasters loved nothing more than to simply hand an hour of daytime to anyone vaguely recognisable, regardless of experience or talent, purely so viewers could watch them drown in real time. Not O’Grady, though. Over time, he built his show around every crevice of his personality. The sets became more idiosyncratic. The studio audiences – so often comatose in that time slot – grew ever more electrified. And, crucially, O’Grady became more and more comfortable with abandoning any form of facade. Whether he was happy, bored, glum or – as often was the case during the David Cameron years – angry, he had the ability to harness all these emotions and fire them straight down the camera at you. It was exceptional.
For the Love Of Paul O’Grady must have been a thankless show to put together. Nobody on earth would have been able to condense the full sweep of this man’s life into a satisfactory hour. To do him justice would involve making an entire multi-part series about him. And, quite honestly, I would watch the lot of it. Millions of us would.
• For the Love of Paul O’Grady aired on ITV and is available on ITVX.
