Julian Clary follows the rules like a rogue escalator:sometimes we’re going up, sometimes down in this filthy, yet reflective hour

High camp, double entendres and outrageous queer acerbic wit. It could only be Julian Clary. The ‘Tsunami of smut’ that follows is his trademark. At the height of his meteoric rise to fame in the early 90s he recounts, for example, with the casualness of somebody passing the salt, how live on television he said that he’d just been “fisting” former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont. It isn’t all filth, however. There’s a very generous side-dish of vulnerability when Clary lets us see behind his heightened, renowned homosexual stage persona.

He shares that, after years of performing in small sweaty queer venues and never having any money to spare, he suddenly found himself propelled into fame and fortune. While at the same time dealing with loosing friends and loved ones to the AIDS epidemic. Experiences that saw him turning to sedatives and grief counselling. All the while falling from grace and being cancelled because of his Lamont joke. As he expresses so eloquently in his impromptu sing along, ‘Life can be a cunt.’ The perfect Christmas refrain, he says.

On ageing, Clary’s opinion is clear. There’s nothing we can do to stop it so we may as well just go along with it. Or else, he says, end up looking like a sleeping bag stuffed into its all-too-small bag with bulging bits jutting out – otherwise known as Simon Cowell.

Clary also laments the loss of good pal Paul O’Grady aka Lily Savage. He shares an anecdote of when Savage once sent him some flowers with a note telling him not to worry about stripping at the end of the show in which he was starring, as it wouldn’t be the first time he’d bared his backside in the area. Adding you can always cover your behind with your hand but these days you’ll probably need two hands, Clary sighs and says, ‘I do miss him!’

There are, as you’d expect, plenty more rear end jokes. I find myself letting out a sigh of relief that I’ve chosen a seat several rows back from the front. One audience member isn’t so lucky, when asked by the comedian, ‘What’s your name?’ Well, you can imagine what came next for Neil. This is the craft of Clary. At the click of his fingers he’s able to turn any subject, even the most challenging, into a laugh-out-loud moment.

This is a complex mix of gags and the stuff of life, each often driving the other. It’s all there: comedy, tragedy, absurdity. Clary ends the show with a tragi-comedic rendition of ‘My Way’, Of course this isn’t just any old rendition. He changes the words to fit the theme of the show and we are left feeling that yes life can be a shit show but what else is there to do but have a laugh along the way?

‘Fully Dilated‘ has finished its run