Julian Clary interview

Julian Clary reveals how no seat is safe when the comic is after victims.

We do love a bit of camp, we Brits. Frankie Howerd, Larry Grayson, Dick Emery, Mr Humphries aka John Inman all perpetuated the non-threatening camp stereotype in the sixties and seventies - unlimited innuendo but no sex please, we're British.

That all changed in the eighties with the coming of alternative comedy and the black leather-clad Julian Clary. Camp's hidden agenda was well and truly outed, paving the way for Rhona Cameron, Graham Norton, Simon Fanshawe and others to do full-frontal gay comedy, warts and all.

In The Archive Hour, Simon Fanshawe traced the history of gay comedy over the past 30 years, from the double standards of Howerd and Grayson, always fearful of alienating the audience by appearing openly homosexual, through the overtly gay material of Clary and Cameron to today's more androgynous approach, where the quality of the material counts for more than any concerns about sexuality.

You got the impression Julian Clary quite missed the shock and awe days of the eighties - "I enjoyed the sharp intake of breath when I crossed the line" - though Fanshawe was in no doubt that today's open-minded audiences were much to be preferred.

Graham Norton said he soon got bored with doing gay jokes, having traded on his gayness at first, and consciously started to introduce other subjects. "I was lucky in that I could do Irish jokes as well as gay jokes," he said.

I'd never heard of the Australian Brendan Burns, a straight stand-up who does a funny line in anti-homophobic material, nor the Anglo-Bengali gay stand-up Paul Sinha, but their contributions sent me scurrying off to YouTube to see further exposure.

Two things can happen when this show really takes off. The back-and-forth over whether a story is true can spiral off in daft directions, as when Julian Clary relates how he's trying to persuade his broody chicken to hatch a duck egg. Or the exchanges can get surprisingly heated. These take-off moments can be too much for the rhythms of the show and end up being edited out. However, here in the final episode of the series, those unseen bits are gathered in for our amusement, and a very enjoyable bunch they are, too.

Rob Brydon displays the patience of Job in tonight's episode: he waits almost 20 minutes - 20 minutes! - before indulging in an impression of guest Ronnie Corbett. I always thought it was like a tic he couldn't control. Aside from Rob's golfing buddy, the guests are master of the double entendre Julian Clary, doughty Geordie Sarah Millican and chirpy Holly Walsh, who proves sharp with the one-liners. The stories are as tall as ever: Clary has a life-sized statue of himself astride a unicorn in his garden; and Millican once spent three hours on the Asda shuttle bus, for a day out. But the comedy hits the greatest heights when Corbett claims he actually had to ask for four candles in a shop.

Ronnie Corbett is the very special guest on David Mitchell's team tonight. It's a chance for host Rob Brydon to try out his favourite Corbett impression on the real thing and also an opportunity for a very happy Lee Mack to fulfil a childhood dream.

Corbett's presence - small though it is - is a huge part of the show which also sees Julian Clary attempting to explain why he's got a unicorn in his garden and David discussing his unusual childhood friendship with a bucket.

The other two panelists, Sarah Millican and Holly Walsh, may be less well-known but in such legendary company as this they more than keep up their end of the banter - adding up to another perfectly breezy ­half-hour.

I'm not even sure it can be described as a comedy: it wasn't even vaguely funny. Jason Manford made a few valiant attempts to shore up the laughter quotient but, on the whole, no luck. The basic premise was that two teams of two (in this instance, regulars Manford and, inexplicably, Peter Andre versus guests Lorraine Kelly and Julian Clary) compete to see who was better able to spot the "odd one in" of four strangers. For instance: who here really is a cockney? Which animal can actually skateboard? Who's not just pretending to hula-hoop? A bit like spotting the odd one out, except the other way around. Clever! Not really: Never Mind the Buzzcocks has been doing this for years, only for them it's a throw-away round, not the basis of the entire programme.

Best of the British Comedy awards

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