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into the phenomenon it’s become. Dan Meier gets the T on And in the UK, I think it took a little longer. Literally when we were RuPaul’s Drag Race UK doing the first season we were talking from World of Wonder’s about doing a version in the UK, but you know, it took a couple minutes.” Fenton Bailey and “A funny footnote here is that Randy and I founded World of Wonder a long time Randy Barbato
fter 11 seasons, years of speculation and millions of sequins (or is it sequence?), RuPaul’s Drag Race finally sashays onto UK screens, as a fresh batch of homegrown queens get ready to snatch the crown. The British series debuts on BBC Three via iPlayer on 3rd October, with guest judges like Graham Norton, Alan Carr and Andrew Garfield joining RuPaul and Michelle Visage on the self-proclaimed Hunger Games of drag. Rumours of the format crossing the pond have circled for almost as long as the show has been on air. Since Jonathan Ross reportedly attempted to bring it over in 2014, two Drag Race stars have been in the Celebrity Big Brother house on Channel 5: judge Michelle Visage (also on Strictly Come Dancing at the time of writing) and contestant Courtney Act, who won the series and the sympathies of anyone for whom a month stuck in a house with Ann Widdecombe sounds like hell on earth. Netflix also ranked the show its fifth most popular reality title this summer. So what took them so long? “I think television executives are nervous nellies by and large, and so they’re not always the greatest visionaries shall we say,” says Fenton Bailey, co-founder of the show’s production company, World of Wonder. “With the exception of the television executives at BBC Three,” adds co-founder Randy Barbato. “Once that ball was moving it was pretty quick, it was a few months,” continues Bailey. “But it was years and years of knocking on every door and we have a collection of rejection emails. And Michelle Visage actually has always been a great cheerleader for us, and as you know she’s beloved in Britain.” “The thing about RuPaul’s Drag Race is it’s had an unusual trajectory in general in terms of television shows,” says Barbato, “because it really has been the little show that couldn’t. And here we are going into our 12th season, and we’re bigger than we’ve ever been. And that’s not the way most TV works. And so even here in the US, it’s taken a long time for it to grow
ago,” says Bailey, “and one of our early shows was back in the day when Channel 4 was very much an innovative, cutting-edge, risk-taking network, and they commissioned RuPaul’s Christmas Ball. So Ru has actually been on British TV and been a part of the culture there for many years. And that was -” “100 years ago,” Barbato cuts in. Given their decade’s worth of experience as executive producers on the shadiest show on TV, you wouldn’t expect there’d be much left to shock Bailey and Barbato, but the British queens are apparently some fierce mothertuckers. “I certainly do remember sitting in the control room as the first contestants entered and thinking, ‘Oh my god it’s so rude!’,” recalls Bailey. “The Brits may seem very polite and reserved, but my god the mouth on those girls!” That said, Bailey and Barbato have no concerns about American audiences being turned off by the coarse humour or the regional dialect, so hopefully we won’t see another Cheryl Cole-style accent debacle. “Drag is always fascinated by new and shiny and different things; drag is not about always wanting the same thing,” notes Bailey. “So it applies similarly to language. Drag loves new words and strange accents and strange pronunciation. Drag loves to play with words as much as wigs and hair and clothes.” Barbato adds: “I think part of the reason that the show continues to grow is that it’s attracting a generation of people - it’s kind of the opposite of what’s happening in politics right now - it’s not about people who are into building walls, it’s about people who are into experiencing new things and welcoming people in. Right now we are at DragCon in New York City, and we just were with all the girls from the UK. And the show hasn’t even come
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