Open the Cage, Murphy!

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I hope one day he does an autobiography of Lily Savage, but not sure who's life would be more outrageous Lily's or Paul’s. I’ve lost just about everybody I know,” he says – Cilla, Jackie, his friends in the drag community, and Murphy, too, who died of a brain tumour in 2005. After decades on the London pub drag circuit, his Lily Savage character finally broke through in Edinburgh, which landed him a handful of TV jobs, including a year-long stint on 90s morning show The Big Breakfast. He says he was only going to do one book, but by the time he had checked the word count on the first, he had only got to Paul at 17.

Open the Cage, Murphy : Hilarious Tales of 9780552169875 - Open the Cage, Murphy : Hilarious Tales of

He will talk about his love of the Salvation Army, of old women in cafes, of people on the bus, of the volunteers at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, of pagans and witches. He says he’s making a documentary about the Salvation Army – with his Catholic upbringing, they’re “strange bedfellows, but we get on like a house on fire” – because they did so much work on the Aids wards in the 80s and 90s.Paul is involved in a plane crash, gets caught up in the LA riots and has a close encounter with Madonna.

Open the Cage, Murphy! - Penguin Books UK

He also appeared in the comedy sitcom Eyes Down (2003–2004) and presented several travel documentaries.She’d come in in the morning, in the dressing gown with her mug and a piece of toast balanced on top: ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Paul? Similarly, in another of his books he describes how he ends up in a ditch full of unmentionables in Eastern Europe. I found myself laughing out loud at some of the colourful antics Paul got up to in his days as lily savage and felt his pain as he lost friends to the AIDS virus. And you’d nurse them as well, and you’d have to break the news to their families, that they’ve got Aids, and the stigma surrounding it at the time … ‘We’ll say he’s got cancer.