It's me stalking Julian Clary!


I was going to say 'dogging Julian Clary', but I don't want to get the wrong kind of search engine hits. Anyway, I may have been keen, but as you can see, he had his number one fan on the left, and I was blown away by the competition.

Anyhoo, it's Lisa's birthday on Wednesday. I can't tell you how old she'll be, but suffice it to say, she's been entitled to free glaucoma checks for a year now. Although she refuses to go. She's like one of my patients. But I digress...

I've booked the outing of a lifetime for her on Wednesday, when we're going to see Igglepiggle live in concert at the O2 in London, but she seems to think I've arranged that more for Amelie than for her. So in an effort to make her feel special, and to show off her new teeth, I bought us front row tickets for ‘An Audience With Julian Clary’ at the Theatre Royal in Brighton yesterday afternoon.

Here's Julian on stage...


That's his big cock on the left. And on the right, doing an impression of the woman out of ‘Ring’, is former Crossroads actress, JoAnne Good. The capital 'A' was her idea.

Julian's got a new novel out, which in the good old days would have meant a free book-signing at Waterstones plus a few photos with the great unwashed. These days it means flogging tickets to the great unwashed for the chance to watch you being interviewed on stage for an hour. It's like The South Bank Show live. But with dogs and double entendres.

Lisa's long been a fan of Julian Clary, and as we tucked into our interval ice cream a full twenty minutes before the show had even started, she told me that she felt sure she could turn him straight. Sure enough, within half an hour, she'd come dangerously close to getting her tongue around his canines.

Julian actually brought two dogs on stage with him. Sitting as we were in the front row, Lisa and I naturally spent most of the first ten minutes having our hands licked. And the dogs were very friendly too. Albert was the more sociable, while Julian likened his other dog Valerie to Claire Sweeney – pretty to look at, but with nothing behind the eyes.

What followed was an enjoyable hour-long chat between Ju and Jo, which covered topics such as writing, performing, doing panto in Northampton and the drinking habits of Craig Revel Horwood. He also described his experiences of living in Noël Coward's house, and finding underwear buried in the garden. It was all interspersed with readings from his novel, and was followed by questions from the floor, the most interesting of which was from a woman who wanted to know who'd stolen her mother's hardback from the disabled toilet. Oddly, Julian couldn't answer that one.

When it was all over, Lisa flatly refused to queue up for an autograph, so it was left to me to do the honours, while she waved to Julian from the stalls and documented the event on camera. I told him she was a paparazzo.

From there we headed along the road to take advantage of the babysitter by having a meal at Strada...


With teeth like that, it's worth making her smile.