Julian Clary - Fully Dilated

Julian Clary brings his new show, Fully Dilated, to the Grand Opera House on Friday 28 May 2027. It's coming to York after a ten-show run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, so it's had a bit of a road-in before it reaches us.

If you've followed Clary for a while, you'll know the persona: the camp, double-entendre-heavy act he's been known for. Fully Dilated is him stepping away from that. He describes it as opening up to the public and revealing all, no longer hiding behind the stage persona. He says he'll talk about things that would get him flogged in Dubai and pointed at in Peckham, and let slip intimate secrets of his life and the traumas that led him to become a camp comic and a renowned homosexual.

It's a fair way from where he started. Clary began on the cabaret circuit as The Joan Collins Fan Club and rose to fame in the late 1980s. Since then, his television credits have run through Sticky Moments, Terry and Julian, Celebrity Big Brother, Have I Got News For You and Celebrity Gogglebox. On stage, he's appeared in Taboo, Cabaret, Le Grand Mort, The Dresser and Bleak Expectations, and played Herod in the 2023-2024 touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar. Fully Dilated is the stand-up show that sits alongside all that.

So, it's Julian Clary at the Grand Opera House on Friday 28 May 2027, with Fully Dilated as the bill.