Julian Clary, touring

“He’s a naughty lad, isn’t he?” said an elderly lady to her husband as they left Julian Clary’s show, Lord of the Mince, which had numerous references to gay sexual practices. The remark wasn’t made in anger, mind, but with a smile on both their faces - and that’s a clue as to why Clary gets away with some unbelievably smutty material. As with many a camp gay comic, from Frankie Howerd and Larry Grayson to, more recently, Graham Norton and Paul O’Grady, the British public just love him.

Clary’s fans fall, I imagine, into two distinct categories; those who know him as a comic, and those who know him from BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing, in which he made his television comeback in 2004 after being effectively banned from British television following that remark. I hope the SCD fans are at least in some small way prepared for Clary the comic, as he rather graphically deals with the subject near the top of the show.

In 1993, at the British Comedy Awards (being broadcast live on TV), Clary made an off-the-cuff joke about the former Chancellor of the Exchequer - “I’ve just been fisting Norman Lamont.” Personally I thought it was one of the funniest quips I had ever heard and it certainly made the rather earnest MP sound infinitely more interesting, but Clary’s career took a nosedive. He went to Australia for a while and, after returning to the UK, was eventually allowed back on TV. And now, I’m delighted to say, he’s fully back in harness (as Clary says, every line a has a smutty gag if you look hard enough...)

Lord of the Mince is about Clary turning 50, which is difficult to believe as he looks as fabulous as ever on stage (I saw the show at the Playhouse Theatre in Weston-super-Mare). He starts by insulting the audience and they love it. Straight people come in for a particular bashing - they’re dull and have bad dress sense, and no doubt seeing him is the highlight of their drab lives - but they lap it up. Even the more explicit sexual material, from fisting to rimming (“Tonight’s references will be mostly anal or oral,” he tells us), is received in polite rather than stony silence by those in the audience to whom it’s all Greek (yep, look hard enough again), although I notice an occasional complicit look between some of the more mature couples. Never judge a book by its cover...

Lord of the Mince is a conversational riff on how Clary feels about being middle-aged and what has happened to him in the past few years; becoming a successful novelist, moving to the country, settling down to a quiet village existence with his boyfriend, minus the drink, drugs and promiscuity of his younger years - all done with a steady stream of innuendo and no entendre left undoubled. There’s backstage gossip from Strictly and faux revelations about the other male celebrities and the size of their appendages. Clary is effortlessly amusing in his very own supercilious fashion and I could have sat through a whole evening of this.

After the interval, though, he comes on dressed as a ringmaster (geddit?) and gets two audience members to perform what are essentially naff party games to determine whether they are psychic. It’s pointless and horribly misguided, although the costume allows him a cracking gag about having once performed in a circus as a human cannonball; “I used to shoot over the ringmaster’s back.”

The second half underlines that Clary doesn’t react quickly enough to do sustained audience interaction, but the pre-interval material is wonderfully entertaining and the audience’s affectionate response serves as a reminder that he has achieved national-treasure status. Oh - and that he can still write an outrageously funny knob gag.