Watch anywhere: tune in today with a top-class VPN (opens in new tab) May every Drag Race series that follows learn from how much we loved them.Stream: watch for FREE on BBC iPlayer (opens in new tab) ![]() Drag Race UK shows that if you bring an interesting group of artists into a room, interesting things happen without much puppetry at all. Series 13 is full of talented performers, but we’ve yet to have an equivalent of Ginny Lemon walking off mid-lip-sync, Awhora and Tia Kofi’s emotional chat about self-worth, or the ferocity of some of these backstage chats. Yet it still made us fall in love with everyone who walked through the door, let them be who they wanted to be, and gave us a series of dramatic set pieces we will never forget. No weeks off, no uncomfortably transparent producer gambits, no lengthy introductions. All nations can benefit from learning it’s better to be uniquely their own thing.īeyond the emotional and political virtues it’s also worth noting that, whether because it’s the BBC or not, the series is a tight, short run. It’s this breadth and this celebratory air that has made this show what it is. Bimini has won over audiences by demanding we dismantle the patriarchy yet, at the same time, doing a fantastic impression of Katie Price. Top-four queen Ellie Diamond is someone who has clearly grown up in the system of drag the US show has presented, and she is very talented at what she does but is wildly different from the camp comedienne Lawrence, the stunning Welsh lip-sync assassin Tayce or the nonbinary and deeply radical Bimini Bon Boulash. Bar a few egregious examples of drag trying to be portrayed as a singular thing, it has largely both embraced Britain’s very specific type of campness and also allowed queens who are very different types of performer flourish. This holistic eye on drag, and a lack of concern about being beat for the gods so they can do a major fashion commercial three months down the line, is what has marked out Drag Race UK as a template for how all national versions of this show should go in the future. Generally, the queens themselves have felt like they want to win but aren’t ready to bend over backwards to do so, probably because there’s no cash prize at the end, but also because they’re Brits: it’s just not in our genetics to be so Spartan all the time. It was a real reminder that being a good drag queen is not the same as being a good Drag Race contestant and that the UK is better than the US at seeing the difference between the two: when queens such as Joe Black or Ginny Lemon (icons in their own right) left early, they were not described as filler or less than, but simply as queens for whom this show wasn’t the best platform. “No more fucking H&M!” roared Ru, who later semi-apologised that this was the result of quarantining before filming resumed.ĭrag Race UK shows that if you bring an interesting group of artists into a room, interesting things happen without much puppetry at allīut, as series two contestant Ginny Lemon said on Twitter after, telling a bunch of drag queens who had been unemployed for seven months – some of whom had been homeless, others surviving on Universal Credit – that they needed to spend money to even come through the door was not the tea. ![]() What dominated the conversation among fans, however, was RuPaul snapping at the aforementioned Joe Black for admitting an outfit worn in a challenge – famously nowhere near as important as their final runway look, which was a work of art in this instance – was off the rack from H&M. You have probably heard the winning version of the earworm single “UK Hun?” because it dominated the internet in its wake. Perhaps the most jarring moment came after a seven-month hiatus for coronavirus, in which the queens came back and competed as two Eurovision girl bands. He’s not alone in failing to read the room: some comments from others judges – Graham Norton in particular – often ask “Is this drag?” when the question really should be “What isn’t drag?”. RuPaul also is much less fluent in UK references than his perennial fellow judge Michelle Visage, which sometimes leads to a dissonance. The huge success of series two means that queens now get much more vitriol than perhaps they did on series one: Lawrence Cheney, one of the top four, has left Twitter Sister Sister, who came back from a Covid hiatus with her face 50 per cent altered, wrote for the Guardian about the abuse she’s received in such searing detail it makes you ashamed to be a fellow fan of the show. That is not to say that the series hasn’t seen some of its problematic American traits cross the seas.
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