A Boy Called Audrey (Pictures from an Exhumation)

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They added, ‘We suggest you make sure your son and this man don’t associate any more.’ We’d been together about six months at the time, we were in love, and and I wasn’t having it and decided that if we couldn’t do it in Glasgow we’d head off and do it somewhere else. Even though I was the younger of two, I was the one who was in charge. I was always very headstrong. That’s been my downfall to this day,” he laughs. At school the kids sensed I was different, they didn't particularly know what it was, just that there was something 'wrong'," he recalls. "As I got a older I read a bit, I haunted the library, but The Trials of Oscar Wilde and Peter Wildeblood's Against The Law, an account of a Homosexual in 1950s Britain, were not encouraging of leading a gay lifestyle. At 14 and 15, this was the source of great concern for me." The star, from Rutherglen, was best known for his part in the long-running musical duo, in which he played Dr Evadne Hinge, and his family confirmed the news on Sunday. That came about when Tommy, my boyfriend at the time, and I were charged with theft,” he reveals. “It really is a stupid, stupid, stupid story. As I was watching all these acts I realised they were getting eight quid for doing gags I’d heard a hundred times. I thought, ‘I could do that and play the piano at the same time and keep the whole 10 quid to myself. That’s how I got into show business, although I didn’t get the 10 quid. As I was a beginner I got eight for doing both – but eight quid for half an hours work wasn’t bad.” George as Audrey

Then, one night, I was sitting at Waterloo Street bus station, waiting for my bus home, when these obvious queens arrived, all camp and outrageous. I was petrified but fascinated at the same time. Inevitably they came over and started taking to me... that was when the door opened.On TV they starred in a number of one-off galas and concerts over the years, and made three series of their own show, Dear Ladies (co-written with Gyles Brandreth), on BBC2 (1983-84). They also appeared in a televised Royal Opera House production of Die Fledermaus alongside Kiri Te Kanawa in 1983.

A flamboyant personality in a small coal-mining town, he knew from an early age that he was different, but felt condemned to a life of clandestine sexual assignations until a late-night bus- stop encounter with four “obvious queens, all camp and outrageous”, who took him to a gay bar. They dubbed him Audrey Auburn – on account of his hair colour – and changed his life. “All the burdens I’d felt, this great pressure to go out with a girl to fit the mould, had gone,” he told his friend the journalist Liam Rudden in an interview in 2021. “It was like God had given me a huge gift, that there was a way through life for me that I had never anticipated.” I knew people who had opened their gobs at the wrong time and ended up with a sore face, but that never happened to me."Then, one night, I was sitting at Waterloo Street bus station, waiting for my bus home, when these obvious queens arrived, all camp and outrageous. I was petrified but fascinated at the same time. Inevitably they came over and started taking to me… that was when the door opened. He wrote: “We became friends and a couple of years later he asked if I’d ever thought about doing something different as an act? He said, ‘I’m tired of all the glamour, the wigs and everything. We could be something like an old retired operatic singer who still thinks she can sing and you could be her pianist’. As a man, of course. I thought, ‘If there is money in it, I’ll try it.’