Which one’s the drag queen? There are no dressing rooms in bars or anything – they have to get ready at home. “You’re so vulnerable anyway, because you’re so obvious. Right, yes, and also there’s quite a lot going on at the moment that is neither funny nor a look? You wouldn’t have to live in India to feel under threat as a drag queen in 2023: you could live in Tennessee. UK drag is so firmly based in comedy, right?” That comes from that American tradition – that thing of serving looks. Now, they need to have costume reveals, they need to do death drops. They wandered out, did a few jokes, maybe sang a song, messed with the audience. Back in the day, when I worked in restaurants, we’d go to gay bars and there would be a drag act at the end of the night, and I’m pretty sure most of them had just one dress, one wig.

“The success of Drag Race has made drag much more popular,” Norton says, “but it’s also raised the bar so ridiculously. Photograph: Joel Palmer/Paramount+Ī cultural form that has always been about fun, flamboyance and play is under sustained attack, yet we are having a conversation that, to my mind, is so avoidant as to be almost wilful. ‘There’s so much grit out there let’s just be nice shiny oysters in here’ … Graham Norton on season 2 of Queen of the Universe. It broke my heart when they came around the corner into the studio with the audience cheering, the lights … It must have been like a waking dream – that they landed in this place, a huge mainstream television show with seemingly a limitless budget.” In season one, I hadn’t thought that through, stupidly. We had one contestant from India … well, a lot of them are trying to perform in countries where there really isn’t a safe space for them to do it. There’s so much grit out there let’s just be nice shiny oysters in here. I ask Norton if he ever wishes that there was a bit more grit in the oyster? “Every now and again, there’s a little bit of grit in the oyster and it makes for great telly,” he says, adding: “It makes me so uncomfortable.” But then, to be real for a second: “I think the grit in the oyster is often the world around the drag performers. Take the niceness of Bake Off and multiply it by a thousand, and you are still nowhere close to how much the contestants are rooting for one another, even though they would all clearly appreciate the $250,000 prize for themselves. The contestants are all so nice to one another, so supportive Norton is so nice the judges are all so nice. The second series of Queen of the Universe, the drag queen singing competition hosted by Graham Norton, has something unspoken about it: it is like a show about something else, camouflaged as classic, competition-format reality TV.

Dream of desires download