In the autumn of 2020, I took a call from ITV. They wanted to know if I was free to produce the new series of Paul O’Grady, For The Love of Dogs, the sadly final series of which launches this week. It was the cold, hard autumn after lockdown and with no work on the horizon, hanging out with unwanted and unloved dogs at Battersea Dogs Home, with Paul O’Grady – formerly the Lily Savage – seemed like a great tonic for the end of a miserable year.
My job was to find stories for each of the dogs sitting in the kennels at Battersea. Terrible, back-breaking work, as you can imagine: it involved lots of petting and snuggling adorable dogs, taking selfies with them and failing to persuade my partner that we should adopt.
Paul would use these stories to riff from – creating TV magic in the process. Basil* the elderly Basset Hound needs to go on a diet; Tomasina*, a bulldog, has separation anxiety, and Connie* the Collie needs a hip replacement. Paul would step in, work with the Battersea team to fix them up and help find these unloved canines their forever home.
Each week Paul would arrive at Battersea in style – clinging on to the back of a motorbike. As the air around me filled with anticipation and nerves, the makeshift dressing room overflowed with four letter words. Paul would be holding court; anecdotes and asides spat out at speed with his famous typical Scouse wit. I would wait on the sidelines ready to brief him on the dogs he’d be filming with and the day’s events. I rarely got a word in.
On this particular day, first up was Connie – a border collie, an unusual dog to find at Battersea and perhaps the victim of a road accident, Connie had a fractured tibia. Paul was to check in with her after surgery in the isolation ward. To my horror, Connie – still supposedly in recovery from her hip replacement – apparently experienced some kind of miracle and immediately jumped on Paul, showering him with affection and a lot of slobber.
Collies are powerful dogs and Paul found himself squashed against the Perspex partition, unable to manoeuvre himself out. The camera team looked on nervously; I mouthed to Paul ‘Are you ok!?’ worried that I was going to be responsible for the injuring (or possibly drowning) of a TV icon. But the scene was a triumph – I watched as Paul rolled about with Connie, both having a terrific time.
When he got to Tomasina, the bulldog with separation anxiety, Paul threw the script out the window. Instead of gently getting her used to being on her own, he was immediately inseparable from her, describing Tomasina as the perfect dog for Lily Savage. Evoking her name gave me the shivers. His Lily Savage was a drag icon from my formative years – a star I had watched from my parents’ sofa as a secretly gay teen throughout the 1990s.
But it was the final job of the day that most left its mark on me. In the kennels, a rare breed dog had been brought in, and the team discovered that it had an infectious disease. Battersea was in its very own lockdown. We asked Paul to help the team clean the kennels.
While waiting to don the deeply unglam protective gear and rubber gloves, he started to reminisce about performing as Lily Savage, at the great queer venue that is the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. It’s a story that is now legendary. At the height of the AIDS crisis, in 1987, the Metropolitan Police raided the tavern, and ridiculously and shamefully the officers were also wearing rubber gloves. Paul was on stage at the time and as they barrelled through the door, cracked the now legendary one-liner that ‘they’d come to help with the washing up’.
Sadly, it was the last time I was to film with Paul; later that week we broke for Christmas and the new year saw yet another lockdown and the series was postponed. But working on POGDOGS, as it was affectionally called, has stuck with me. It was a window into a world of true joy, and I think this has been the secret to the series’ – and Paul’s – huge success. His love of his four-legged friends was utterly infectious; it wasn’t for the camera, it was true. He liked nothing more than being slobbered on, licked and to show love to hounds that had hit on hard times. That came shining through. He will be greatly missed.
*Dog names changed to protect their identity
Paul O’Grady, For the Love of Dogs will air on ITV and ITVX on Thursday April 13 at 8.30pm. Michael Ogden’s documentary George Michael: Outed, is out now on All 4
