"Laugh yourself stupid with hialrious manic comedy and gloriously tacky songs" THE GUARDIAN

I could watch his act over and over, as indeed I have. When I run my eye down the list of comics performing around town, a tiny tear wells over the familiarity before it.

Bob Downe is different _ still a fresh, solid act. "I'd forgotten how much I love this suit," Downe says, his smile as sincere as Sally Field at the Academy Awards. "Very Swanston Walk, don't you think?" Downe's selection of music as usual opens some nasty wounds: `Lucky Star' ("And we can thank our lucky stars that we're not as smart as we'd like to think we are") and Paul Anka's `Having My Baby' ("What a lovely way to say how much I love you").

Downe is in fine form _ the chi-chi dance steps, the faux sincerity and the sharp reflections on the blancmange world of advertorial where, right here in Melbourne, the purveyors of hair-care products are somehow elevated to the status of television guest.

Downe is joined by the Edinburgh Festival veteran Lily Savage. I have to confess I was dreading her on the grounds that drag, like musical comedy, is so rarely amusing. But as it turned out, Liverpool's tallest drag queen is a fine contributor, offering a delightful mix of pathos and brutality, even if on the odd occassion she stretches the joke a touch far.

Her comedy routines were strong, while the songs weren't so great. Conversely, I believe Bob Downe is at his most potent when he strikes the Roger David store-dummy position and launches into songs by people who, at some stage, we've wanted to drown.

The 90-minute show rushed by, which must mean I throughly enjoyed it. If there is a weak moment, it is Downe drifting too far out of character through excessive swearing. By now, we are familiar enough with Downe to know he would no sooner say f--- than would Roy Hampson.

Postscript: Don Lane did once tell a skeptic on his show to p--- off, but my point remains.
Peter Wilmoth

"It's not something I set out to do," he says, batting eyelashes that would put Barbara Cartland to shame. "I mean, I never thought I'd be sitting in Sydney dressed like this ..."

Paul O'Grady - Lily Savage to his audience - used to be a London social worker. Eight years ago he decided he'd had enough - "enough of other people's kids and old women wetting the bed and cutting old men's toenails to last me a lifetime".

He was working in a bar when the amateur talent night's compere didn't show up. He was persuaded to fill in, got up on stage with a modified drag act that he had abandoned years before, and Lily Savage was born.

Since then Lily has taken him around Britain, Europe, Scandinavia, the Middle East and the US. She has had him voted Entertainer of the Year seven years in a row in London's gay newspaper, Capital Gay, and attracted an audience that ranges from gay to grey-rinse.

And all thanks to a "dead common" Liverpool character who berates audiences with details of her life.

The act, says O'Grady, covers everything: "Shopping, men who go around with babies on their backs, the pill, the coil".

"People say: 'How you do know about these things? How do you know about PMT and hormonereplacement therapy?' You just look it up, don't you - do a bit of research.

"I went home one time and me aunt was lying on the couch and I said: 'What's up wi' you?' And she said: 'Ooh, I've just had me coil out', and she described this coil. It sounded like a mound of barbed wire she'd just had taken out. And what she'd had done to her in the hospital! 'Well', I thought, 'I've got to use that'."

Lily Savage is married. She lives in Liverpool, has two kids, an absentee husband, a whippet called Queenie and two Persian cats. She shoplifts to survive, shows no respect for authority and has, in O'Grady's words, "a bit of a mean mouth on 'er an' all".

"I get on very well with women because my character hates men," says O'Grady. "I tend to get the women saying to me - like feminists, intelligent women - saying: 'God, I wish I could say that'.

"I can say stuff they wouldn't accept from a female comic and they wouldn't tolerate from a man. But me in this no-man's-land they can put up with, because it's all fantasy."

Lily hasn't aged over the past eight years, but she can't live forever: "I don't want to be a 60-year-old Lily Savage, tottering around in thighlength boots, really drunk, abusing the audience," says O'Grady. "I'll give her another couple of years."

Lily Savage appears with Bob Downe in the show, Very Very Together, at Kinselas, Darlinghurst, until February 28; call 331 3299.
Helen O'Neill

* Do you like Pina Coladas? The seductively coiffed Bob Downe, host of Good Morning Murwillumbah (which is a strange name for a dishwashing detergent), did not find Triple Jay's songs to have safe sex by very satisfying. He suggests:

1. Havin' My Baby, Paul Anka.

2. We Do It, R. and J. Stone.

3. Hang On In There Baby, Johnny Bristol (lyrics include "oooo right there, baby, don't you move it anywhere," and so appears to be a romantic ditty about rearranging the furniture).

4. Hooked on Bolero, Tommy Tycho and The Silver Spade Showband starring Kerry Ann Karaoke.

5. Lucky Star, Dean Freidman and Denise Marsa (lyrics: "And you can thank your lucky stars we're not as smart as we'd like to think we are". An interesting choice).

We're sure he meant to include Escape (the Pina Colada song), by Rupert Holmes, the most romantic song of all time next to Classic, by Adrian Gurvitz: "I'm gonna write a classic, gonna write it in an attic 'cos, baby, I'm an addict, an addict for your love."
Elizabeth Jurman