David Behrens meets the man behind Lily Savage

PAUL O'GRADY emerges from his dressing room in a loose robe and pink fluffy slippers. Nothing else.

A cigarette hangs from his bottom lip, as if hinged there.

He is a major stage and television star, but you wouldn't guess it. Not, at any rate, until he opens his mouth.

"If you don't know who I am, why do you want me flippin' autograph?" he sighs incredulously at a middle-aged, anoraked man who'd been pressing his nose against the stage door.

The tobacco-soaked Scouse screech, rough as a sack of old gravel, belongs unmistakably to the bottle-blonde, dragged-up Merseyside motormouth, Lily Savage. The pink slippers were a giveaway anyway.

We are in Bradford's Alhambra theatre, where O'Grady, as Lily, is in the middle of a triumphant, two-week run in the musical Annie.

"I roared laughing when they asked me to do this show, you know," he says. "You can't imagine anything more wholesome, can you? It'll be the Sound of Music next."

The West End was cynical at first about putting a drag queen into a straight role. But O'Grady is used to turning showbusiness convention on its head.

"We've had an enquiry now about me doing Oliver! next year. I didn't know at first whether they meant Fagin or Nancy. When they said Fagin, I said I'd think about it."

There's no one else in the business who could even conceive of playing both the male and female leads in a show.

But then, almost everything about O'Grady is a paradox. On stage as Lily Savage, he radiates the spangly-frocked, showbiz glamour he is there to send up. Off-duty, he says he would sooner die than spend time with some of his peers.

He prefers instead to potter around Saltaire, where he has a flat, and to visit Ilkley to take tea at Betty's.

It was on a previous visit to the Alhambra, with the musical Prisoner Cell Block H, that he slipped out to buy cigarettes and returned having bought a flat in the shadow of Salt's Mill.

"It was just the best thing I ever did. I'm up here now more than I'm in London. It's great. It suits me."

He wasn't a stranger to the district: he'd lived in Slaithwaite and in Leeds years ago, when he was still a social worker.

"People look at you like you're mad when you mention Bradford," he says. "I was at a do recently and Bob Monkhouse mentioned that he had a place in Jamaica. So I said, 'I've got a place in Bradford'. Bit of a conversation stopper, that. But it's a great place, Bradford. So's Leeds.

"When I was 16, all I wanted to do was get out of Birkenhead. So later I went to London and did all the clubs. But as you get older, you think, there's nothing here for me. I don't wanna go discoing every night - I'm too bloody knackered."

London now - its media haunts especially - threaten him, he says.

"I can't stand all that. Half the people are out of their minds on coke or heroin, and they're in and out of drying-out clinics. I just think, it'll be a cold day in hell before you see me on the front of a tabloid - 'My alcohol problem by Lily Savage'.

"I've never ever bothered with that side of it. I get invites to all the premieres but I don't go. It's hideous. Bloody awful. I can't think of anything worse. You come out bevvied and they stick their cameras in your face and then you're in all the papers with a fag and a glass.

"It's a dangerous game, that - living your life in the tabloids."

Showbusiness accountants, he says, make life increasingly difficult for his sort of performer. "We're treated like carthorses. The BBC's spent all its money on digital telly and world news and everything else has gone out of the window." Yet he has little time for stars who moan about their lot.

"They're spoiled, half of them. Totally spoiled. A lot of people in the business have got it soft, and they blow it up. You read about these bankruptcy cases and you think, 'The money you've earned. Where's it gone?' Boozing and cracking up, that's where. What would make me crack up is if I had six kids to look after, no money and a flat on a council estate."

Despite his background in the London theatre pubs, O'Grady's comic roots are at the end of the northern seaside piers, where his heroes Hylda Baker and Norman Evans once trod the boards.

"I don't watch a lot of comedy on television now," he says. "A lot of it leaves me cold. It's either really cruel or it's middle class and bland.

"People don't ad lib any more - and when they do, it's advertised. 'New material tonight'. Isn't that what comedy's supposed to be anyway? It's like putting New Fat in the window if you've got a chip shop. Makes me sick."

He prefers to watch traditional comics like Yorkshire's Johnnie Casson, and his friend and Saltaire neighbour Jayne Tunnicliffe, whose character Mary Unfaithful is a rising star on the comedy circuit.

O'Grady says he doesn't know how long Lily Savage's onward life will be. "I think about it in the middle of the night: do I really wanna be clacking round in high heels and a bloody mini skirt for the rest of my life?

"If ever I got a whiff that it was going off, I'd drop it like a hot brick, I really would. I wouldn't flog a dead horse."

In the meantime, he has accepted two more "straight" roles - in the police drama Liverpool One (out of drag, as a villainous club owner) and in a low-budget film called County Kilburn. "It's nice going to work without a bin liner with a wig in it, two suitcases and a make-up box."

For the moment, though, another Bradford show awaits, and it's into the make-up box that he dives. The local audience loves him; he knows it and he's grateful.

"They're not like those heckle-hole comedy clubs, where they analyse everything before they laugh. Here, they really want you to succeed and that's great. It gives you a buzz, and it's hard to ignore that sort of thing."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.