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Drag SOS: Queens for a day seek their inner fabulous - or is just a bit of window-dressing?

Let’s take Drag SOS at face value.

It is, it says here, a major new makeover show. It is certainly two of those things, and given that the makeover genre requires strict adherence to a narrative formula in which the challenge is met and the over is made, it is at least novel in the way it stretches the boundaries of inclusivity.

The makeover artists are The Family Gorgeous, a group of drag queens from Manchester.

The full fry-up: above, left to right, Georgina, Tete, Lill, Anna Phylactic, Cheddar Gorgeous, Liquorice Black, Ashley, Astina Mandella and Matthew (Adam Lawrence / Channel 4)
The full fry-up: above, left to right, Georgina, Tete, Lill, Anna Phylactic, Cheddar Gorgeous, Liquorice Black, Ashley, Astina Mandella and Matthew (Adam Lawrence / Channel 4)

They are pretty extraordinary, and travel around Britain in a bus listening to Anita Ward singing Ring My Bell, as they look for ordinary people who would like to be fabulous. Fabulous in this context is a word which is proud of its extremes, and the show’s conceit is that things can be better if fabulousness is embraced. “Let’s be honest,” says one of the queens, “the UK at the moment needs to find its fabulous.”

Seeking to find their inner drag and put a wow back into their lives are Shaun, a middle-aged man’s man who is struggling to connect with Owen, his son. Owen is gay and his drag persona is Lily Berlin. Shaun seems to be on a journey. He admits that he isn’t keen on seeing men kissing on television, and that when Owen came out at the age of 13, he had “caveman thoughts”.

Then there is Nico, a 21-year-old student who has struggled with bulimia and still worries about her body. And single mum Abby, whose two children have ADHD. Abby wants to reconnect with her real self, who she describes as a “sparkly bitch”. Putting aside for a moment the question of whether the best way to cope with problems of self-esteem or parental guilt is to volunteer for a television programme in which success will be measured by one’s performance in a lip-synch dance to Pride by Heather Small, it seems as if Shaun is playing for the highest stakes.

Pictured: Astina Mandella, Cheddar Gorgeous, Lill, Anna Phylactic, Tete Bang, Abby and Nico. (Slater King / Channel 4)
Pictured: Astina Mandella, Cheddar Gorgeous, Lill, Anna Phylactic, Tete Bang, Abby and Nico. (Slater King / Channel 4)

Unlike Abby or Nico, whose ambitions seem to be encapsulated by the formula expressed by drag queen Cheddar Gorgeous — “become the person you think you probably can’t be” — Shaun is confronting his own prejudices.

Possibly, by the time he agreed to do the show he was quite far along this road, but it’s still something to see him in a kaftan made of curtains, looking like Mrs Slocombe reimagined by John Waters.

Not long after he made The Long Good Friday, Bob Hoskins took a walk down the London docks with Barry Norman. Bits of the film are still online. In it, Hoskins complains about the redevelopment of the area (“like something out of Winnie The Pooh”), and compares the new buildings to “bleedin’ great Mars bars on the Thames.”

Tony Robinson isn’t in the business of complaining as he makes a similar trip in The Thames: Britain’s Great River With Tony Robinson — around Wapping and Canary Wharf, down the river on a police launch, onto the roof of the O2. It’s fair to say the London of Hoskins’s walk, though, looks like Mars compared to the landscape encountered by Robinson.

He spends a day at Billingsgate fish market, just for the halibut, and meets some actual old-school East Enders. On the river, the marine police are called to investigate an unexploded bomb but sail off before it explodes.