Julian Clary on how his new murder mystery book tackles the darkness of... daytime TV

Julian Clary has written a novel involving an “unbearable, self-absorbed, failing, camp comic”. Called Julian Clary.

“It amuses me,” says Clary (that’s the non-fictional one, sitting in his very real and rather elegant living room beneath an only slightly obscene framed print), “because he [the fictional one] is so self-important he can’t resist putting himself in the book. So it’s a sort-of battle between telling the story and me barging my way in all the time.”

Confusing? A little. Entertaining? Very much so. Because not only can readers of The Midmorning Murders enjoy the twists and turns of the plot (daytime TV show starts popular new segment solving cold cases; soon runs out of murders; fresh case is needed quickly; cut-throat TV executives will stop at nothing), but they will also relish Clary’s waspish insider take, too. “On the face of it, it’s a murder mystery, and I think it works on that level,” he says, “but it’s a satire, too, of murder mysteries and the world of television.”

That’s certainly a landscape he knows: since, as he puts it, “mincing” onto our screens on Saturday Live then Friday Night Live in the 1980s (“dressed in rubber with a dog”, he reminisces), Clary has barely been off the telly, hosting his own idiosyncratic game shows, sticking an electric cattle prod up other presenters’ panel shows, coming third on Strictly, second on Taskmaster and first on Celebrity Big Brother – not to mention presenting This Morning, a clear model for the novel’s fictional Morning All! show.

Given the latter in particular, it’s impossible not to wonder which bits of the book are pinched from reality. So… which are?

“It’s all mixed up. I am really good friends with a dresser from Birmingham, so Jayne [the book’s protagonist, a dresser from Birmingham] is based on a real person. But Julian is a one-dimensional version of me, and I’ve always got an eye on the laughs when writing me into the book. My husband in the book isn’t really my husband, either, because he doesn’t like being involved in my nonsense.” (The real-life other half didn’t even bother reading Clary’s last book till months after it was published, he grimaces.)

And the “foetid corrosion of the soul” experienced by all “TV types” that the book’s Julian observes? Is that true? “Oh, yes. There are some absolutely awful, awful people in television. I just read in some letters between [20th-century literary titans] Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing, Lessing told Spark that people who work in television are ‘unprincipled, dishonest and above all idiotic’. Plus ça change! So this is my revenge.”

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The publishing industry doesn’t entirely escape Clary’s acerbic eye, either. So was he, as he is in the novel, gently pressured into finding a way to get Claudia Winkleman onto the cover of his book in order to sell more copies? “I have had those sorts of meetings with publishers. In fact, the next book might be about the world of publishing.”

Clearly he stood his ground because the Traitors host is noticeably absent from the cover of The Midmorning Murders. “Well, these days I only do things I want to do. There was a time, 20 or 30 years ago, when I thought, ‘Oh, I’d better do Celebrity Tipping Point or whatever, because I’ve got to get some new French windows.’ Now I can ask myself, ‘Will this make me happy?’”

Definitely ticking that box is taking part in panto. “A nice lowbrow five weeks dressing up with my friends? That is my happy place,” sighs the veteran smut-monger, who has been strewing the nation’s stages with double entendres for nearly three decades now. This year he’ll be the fairy godfather at the London Palladium, opposite Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. “I’ve done it with Dawn twice and Jennifer once,” he purrs, seemingly slipping into innuendo mode without even noticing it. “To have them both, my cup runneth over.”

His dream castmates, he says, would be Larry Grayson (who did, indeed, grace the Palladium panto in his day) and Princess Diana (who did not). But his own place in the pantomime pantheon is apparently assured: with 11 seasons at the Palladium under his diamanté belt, he has been afforded the honour of getting his picture on their wall of fame.

“I’m next to Shirley Bassey and Norman Wisdom at the moment,” he says. “But I’m sort of waist-high, so I imagine drunken youths might urinate on me as they pass by late at night. Still, rather me than Shirley Bassey.”

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