50, FISTS, AND FURRY FASHION – A JULIAN CLARY TALE FOR WIND BACK WEDNESDAY
- Bernard Zuel
- Aug 6
- 4 min read
We’re a tame bunch these days – scared of smut in particular, though it’s hardly alone in the too-hot-to-handle-in-polite-society basket. Which is probably for the best on most fronts when you come across comedy schlock like, say, Love Thy Neighbour and Hey Hey It’s Saturday, half the people on Blankety Blanks and anyone who did the prawn and beer night at Dee Why RSL.
Ah, those were the days. Very long stupid days and endless nights in front of the four-channel TV.
But sometimes you look back and think, They did what? They said what? What????? And you can’t help but shake your head in something like admiration, maybe with a smirk, at some rule benders and line crossers.
Someone who sailed close to, and as you’ll see below across on occasion, said line, was Julian Clary. Wind Back Wednesday finds him having turned 50, marking a quarter of a century of public renown, and seemingly confident of his place with “camp nonsense”. But was he really?
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JULIAN CLARY, HE OF THE ARCHED eyebrow and the devastating putdown, is actually rather polite. You might even say a gentleman were it not for the fact that no gentleman would be game enough to wear quite that much eye shadow. At least not without an orange in his mouth.
Mindful of the fact that Clary's announcement of this month's tour had a footnote that said while the "dress code is smart but casual … the usual rules about corduroy trousers still apply", I confess straight up that in my past there have been incidents of corduroy trouser wearing.
Should I leave this interview immediately, in shame?
"I am prepared to continue as long as you’ve seen the error of your ways," the self-proclaimed Lord Of The Mince says benevolently. "Are you a rustic person? Is that why, because you live in the countryside?"
Ah, no, all city all the time here. But in my defence, it was the 1980s at the time.
“Well there you go. I may have had a pair myself in the ‘80s.”
Hmm, methinks not. But anyway, given the theme of this tour is a celebration of "25 years in the camp spotlight", does he remember fashion and personal mistakes he made back then or does he tend to wipe them from his memory and move on?
"Oh, I move on, I don't dwell on mistakes. There’s no point is there? It all seemed a good idea at the time," he says blithely. “There was lots wrong with the ‘80s, like black rubber. But actually I think black rubber is fairly timeless. As long as your body is all right at the time.”
Surely the elegant and slim Mr Clary has never looked anything but the type who could pull off black rubber, so to speak.
"Well I'm 50 now," he chuckles. "So time takes its toll, and I now wear rather glamorous suits which cover a multitude of sins."
Ah yes, sins. The man who took high-end smut and low-end double entendres into the tittering homes of Britain and Australia, who somehow got strap-ons, plugs and other accoutrements into casual conversation, who brought the Carry On/Dick Emery/Benny Hill school up to date, and out of the closet, has probably had a few of them.
But now’s not the time to revisit them. Or is it? Clary turned 50 last year, the kind of landmark which can lead some people to reappraisals or just panic. Did he have a crisis approaching the half century?
"The build-up to being 50 is traumatic but the reality is you feel like a survivor and you have some kind of kudos and a past to look back on," he says. "I'm very serene for the first time in my life."
You can see this serenity in his autobiography called A Young Man’s Passage (no, you’re not the only one to smirk at that one), where he expands on the view that “everything happens for a reason. That there is a higher force at work and everything resolves”.
Such a sanguine approach even extends to what he calls "my Norman Lamont incident", when during the broadcast of some comedy awards in the early ‘90s he made a spectacularly obscene reference to the Tory politician. The comment brought down a storm of tabloid outrage on his head and saw him temporarily banned from live TV.
"It was a time when, looking back on it, I needed time out, and making a fisting reference on live television is one sure way of having your diary cleared," he says calmly.
And now the comedian is still here while the politician is barely remembered. It may well be that Julian Peter McDonald Clary, author of two novels, a regular newspaper column, and two books on comedy as well as his autobiography, may have had the first and the last laugh.
“Yes I am amazed that I'm still here. I'm full of admiration for my own tenacity and longevity,” Clary declares. “When I started out, in my 20s, I thought I wouldn't be doing this by my 30s but would be a qualified probation officer by then. But here I am finding new areas of camp old nonsense to explore and that's how I earn my living. I'm quite proud of that."
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