Ooh, You Are Awful

I’ve been starting some research into the history of drag for a presentation I’ll be doing at VauxhallVille during Gay History Month. I haven’t got as far as the seventies in the book I’m reading, it’s still prattling on about Kabuki which I don’t really find that interesting, but images of drag on 70s TV shows keep popping into my mind - mainly the fabulous Dick Emery, and Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough as Cissy and Ada.

Though they were un-PC times, (remember Love Thy Neighbour?) you could pretty much get away with being camp as tits on TV so long as your were funny. It wasn’t just drag, Larry Grayson would mince around all limp wrists and “shut that door” and nobody batted an eyelid. I think there was a lot of denial about the gay thing, the exception might have been Hinge and Brackett, they seemed to make my mum a bit uncomfortable.

They were closer to female impersonation than drag and you kind of got the feeling that they might just “go at it” once they took the frocks off. My mum, I should point out, was someone who would sternly refer to the two women who lived together down the road as “THE SISTERS”. When her friends would counter that, “Um, I don’t think they are sisters, you know, Barbara,” she would respond with a clipped, “YES THEY ARE.” And that was the end of the subject.

Most of the drag characters looked like the pantomime dames that we’d all been brought up on at Christmas, particularly Cissy and Ada who were very definitely Cinder’s two ugly sisters. They would sit about gossiping, hitching up their boobs and tutting about the state of their neighbours.

“She’s no better than she should be” was a familiar line, or “she’s too thick with her lodger for my liking. Well I heard her bedsprings going at three-o-clock this morning and her husband's on regular nights.”

With Dick Emery you got both drag and camp queens. There was his brassy blonde, Mandy, possibly his most famous character, who would startle men by suddenly screaming, “Ooh, you are awful, but I like you,” while practically knocking them over. Then was sex-starved Hettie, the lonely spinster who would go to any length imaginable to get a man.

I think my favourite might have been Clarence, the flaming queen who would prance about calling everyone “honky tonk” and salivating over the male form without shame.

So as I lapse into panto mode for a moment, have you all seen this nice piece of Dick? Oh look, here’s another one. BEHIND YOU etc.