Writer: Tim Connery
Director: Alex Donald
Comedian Larry Grayson’s career peaked in the early 1980s, when he took over hosting BBC1 Saturday night staple The Generation Game. His role on that show afforded glimpses of his stand-up routines, which were camp, gossipy stories of a bevvy of characters with innuendo-laden names and escapades.
Tim Connery’s biographical script begins with a framing device based on Grayson’s love of and belief in spiritualism. A medium connects with Grayson’s recently departed spirit, and he must tell his story before passing over to the other side. Thankfully, that aspect of the evening is dispensed with quickly, and instead, performer Luke Adamson can focus on delivering a hilarious performance.
Adamson – who, in his double-breasted suit and slicked-down hair, resembles Bob Monkhouse more than Grayson, but let’s not quibble – ping-pongs between recreating Grayson’s stand-up and retelling Grayson’s biographical details.
And what details they are. Born William Sulley White out of wedlock, at just a few days old, his mother arranged for him to be fostered by a family in Nuneaton. He was eight when he discovered that the “aunt” who was a family friend was, in truth, his birth mother. When his foster mother died young from cancer, one of his sisters had to give up a career and a promising romance to care for her little brother full-time. It’s clear that, while he was never formally adopted, he grew up in a family filled with unconditional love.
The young William’s obsession with performance and growing campness is a tale that will resonate with many young, gay performers. We don’t hear much about how the young man’s burgeoning sexuality is handled within his loving family. However, we do get a very touching view of William’s childhood best friend, Tom, who died in World War II and remained the lost love of Grayson’s life.
As the years progress and young William moves towards professional entertainment – first under the stage name Billy Breen, adopting his well-known persona of Larry Grayson only in the late 1950s – Connery slowly transforms the character into the adult performer we witness through Adamson’s recreation of Grayson’s onstage routines.
There are moments of obvious pain. Grayson’s first attempt to migrate from the working men’s clubs that accepted him, to TV, a route many of his contemporaries navigated with ease, the backlash was severe (it’s the middle classes that hate gay people, Adamson’s Grayson tells us, “and they’re the ones with the TVs.”) And years later, following the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in the late 1960s, activists from the Gay Liberation Front would picket his shows, protesting at the stereotypical portrayal of a gay man.
But Grayson was authentically himself on stage, his humour based on community gossip rather than malice or caricature. Adamson describes him sitting down and taking tea with some GLF members – individually, “nice boys” – and, while ruing that the protests would deter the audiences he yearned to entertain, he never seems to hold a grudge.
Anybody looking for a dramatic tale of a traumatic offstage life would have to look elsewhere. That was never part of Grayson’s story, and so is not present here. Instead, Luke Adamson’s hilarious recreation presents us with an ample demonstration of why both the name and the comedy of Larry Grayson should be forever remembered.
Runs until 30 August 2025
