I need routine, otherwise I just go to the dogs

Sep 20 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Emma Pinch discovers Paul O’Grady has found a new love for writing, as his hit Channel 4 talk show returns to our screens

HE’S been Paul O’Grady, woodsman, then brothel barman, cleaner, care worker and drag queen.

MBE was a title he never pictured attached to his name.

Indeed, O’Grady reveals he thought his MBE was a weak attempt at a practical joke when the letter from Buckingham Palace arrived last June.

Says O’Grady, 53: “I’ve got a weird friend who sends me letters looking really official saying ‘Dear Mr O’Grady, we have reason to believe you are running a brothel at weekends’, or ‘Dear Mr O’Grady, this baby-farming has got to cease’, so I thought it was one of those.

“And then they rang me up and said ‘Why haven’t you sent your letter back?’. And then the penny dropped.”

Another first for O’Grady is the publication of his autobiography, At My Mother’s Knee: And Other Low Joints, on September 24.

The book chronicles his life up to when he moved to London, aged 18, and, he says, “is longer than Lord of the Rings”.

To recap, Paul James Michael O'Grady was born to Molly and Paddy on June 14, 1955, in Birkenhead. Growing up in Tranmere, he was the youngest of three. He attended St Joseph's Catholic Primary School in Prenton and later St Anselm's College, Manor Hill, a Christian Brothers school.

As a child, he loved dressing up and says: “Even today, if I see a wig, a hat or a bit of material, it's on my head. I can't help it.”

Once he started writing his autobiography, he found he couldn’t leave anything out.

“I sat down and started it, and I did the word count and I’d got over 100,000 words, and by that stage I wasn’t even 11,” he says.

“But I’ve done lots about the family, about my mum, and I have included conversations and dialogue and things like that. That’s what took up all the space.

“It gives people a general idea of what it was like, what life was like then and there.”

Now that the book’s due out next week, he’s having panic attacks: “I go to bed and I think: ‘Why did I put that in?’”

“I’m delighted to get rid of it,” he admits. “It became an obsession. So much so that I’ve started on the second one. I’ve left the first one on a cliff hanger so you have to follow that up.

“While I’m in the habit I’ll keep going. It’s become part of the routine, to sit down and bang out a couple of hours each day.”

O’Grady’s also branching out into fiction, inspired by a childhood passion: “I used to love the Pan Horror Stories when I was a kid. They were short horror stories and I was mad on them. So I decided to write 13 of them. And they’re very creepy.

“You watch these films, and you think ‘What kind of a person thinks all of these twisted ideas up?’. And then actually you realise you can be every bit as creepy yourself.”

Next week also marks a new series of The Paul O’Grady Show on Channel 4, with whom he has a contract until 2009.

But O’Grady has been making the most of his time off.

He set off for America in the summer, first calling in at Las Vegas. His dream of the high camp, high-living capital was punctured.

“Hated every minute of it,” he reports. “I was there two days, and then left. I absolutely couldn’t stand it.

“You look out of the window and there’s the Eiffel Tower, which they’re very proud of. But there’s no irony. It’s all for real, they don’t go, ‘We’ve got the Eiffel Tower – wink, wink!’

“It’s completely devoid of camp. The entire place is soulless. Everything’s artificial.

“There are no showgirls, no Dean Martin, nothing like that. And the amount people eat! I kept saying ‘Keep moving, or they’ll eat us!’”

So O’Grady decamped to LA, where fellow author Jackie Collins invited him round to dinner. He says she was “very good” and didn’t try to force tips on him about writing.

“She just sort of leaves you to it,” he says. “The one thing she did say was ‘Don’t sit there worrying about a beginning, a middle and an end, just put it all down.

“’And when it’s like a jigsaw, put it all together.’”

O’Grady suffered a heart attack in 2002. After his health scare, he moved from London to a farm in Kent, stocked with 32 animals, to create a calmer life.

He reveals he enjoys baking cakes – strawberry torte is his most requested signature dish, and he likes to make his own ice-cream.

But he’s found he can’t stay still for long. He’s looking forward to the start of the new series, as pleasingly familiar as previous shows.

“Every time we change even the tiniest things, you wouldn’t believe the complaints we get.

“You put new fabric on the sofa and there’s a discussion for around a month about whether they like it, until they forget all about it. Change it and they don’t like it at all.

“But I get bored when I’m not working – books and holidays aside. I need to go back to work.

“I need a routine, otherwise I go to the dogs.”

AT MY Mother’s Knee . . . And Other Low Joints, by Paul O’Grady, is published by Bantam Press on September 24 (£18.99).

THE Paul O’Grady Show returns to Channel 4 on September 22, Monday to Friday, 5pm.

emma.pinch