Putting Middlesbrough on the map with comedy Smoggie Queens

With the final episode of BBC series Smoggie Queens recently airing, writer Phil Dunning shares what it was like growing up in northern England and how he wrote his LGBT comedy.

With Smoggie Queens, comedy writer and actor Phil Dunning says he was keen to create a show that portrayed his hometown in a positive light.

"It's so stupid and ridiculous and out there," Dunning laughs about his BBC comedy Smoggie Queens, set in Middlesbrough.

The writer stars as drag queen Dickie in the series. Dickie's friendship circle is made up of Sal (played by Patsy Lowe), Lucinda (Alexandra Mardell), Mam (Mark Benton) and newly-inducted Stewart (Elijah Young).

The series has everything from a drag queen moonlighting as an ice cream lady to a Titanic-themed drag brunch.

Dunning says he "loved" being back in all his old haunts while filming Smoggie Queens, like his secondary school, the garden centre where he used to buy the family Christmas tree with his mum and the cinema where he had his first job.

"It's so nice to get local talent in and be able to offer work to all these people that are just amazing talents - and that just happen to live up north."

And Dunning is no stranger to the world of comedy. He's a founding member of the sketch group Oyster Eyes alongside the likes of Natasia Demetriou, from BBC series Ellie & Natasia. Dunning also appeared in the BAFTA-winning BBC comedy thriller Am I Being Unreasonable?

In Middlesbrough, there were two gay bars where Dunning would go out dancing, he remembers.

"One of them was one of those where you had to ring the doorbell, and they'd look through a camera to see if you weren't threatening," he says about the safe environment these venues tried to create.

Drag queens would work at these club nights and Dunning came to know some of them.

But outside of LGBT-specific spaces, drag queens could also be seen in the media.

"It was kind of mainstream, in a way, with Lily Savage, wasn't it?" says Dunning about the British TV comedian and personality Paul O'Grady who created drag queen Savage.

Fellow northerner O'Grady, who was from Merseyside, was a champion of gay rights up until his death in 2023 and is remembered for Lily's larger-than-life personality on screen.

"She was brilliant. She got away with it because she was just filthy," Dunning says about why he found Savage's comedy and personality so appealing.

And more recently, there's been northern representation in RuPaul's Drag Race UK. In the most recent UK series, runner up La Voix is originally from Stockton-On-Tees.

And in series five, the final three queens Ginger Johnson, Michael Marouli and Tomara Thomas were all from northern England.

Drag queen Linda Gold is the co-founder of FunnyBoyz, a northern-based drag collective and business that works to improve working conditions for queens, and agrees there's something that sets northern drag queens apart.

"I get the essence of why [Dunning] filmed up north, because northern drag queens are so different to the south," Linda says about northern humour.

When Dunning first began writing Smoggie Queens, he says he wanted to lean into the comedy of the story - but his producer opened him up to including emotional moments.

For example, in the series Dickie goes through a break-up, Mam has a son they don't see and Stewart isn't out to his family yet. But the moments of comedy are never far behind.

"I love it… I'm like, 'Can I get away with this?' And then just push it as much as I can... there's, like, a farcical nature to it, and there's a real drag element to it," says Dunning on writing the show.

In one scene, the gang arrive at Dickie's place of work, a boring office, in a Cinderella-style horse-drawn carriage much to the surprise of Dickie's boss.

Michelle Visage, a judge on RuPaul's Drag Race UK, plays fellow office employee Elaine.

"She'd seen the pilot and she'd read the script, and she was just like: 'Yeah, get me in.'"

The writer even had a "surreal" moment with Visage on set where they lip synced to the song And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going from the musical Dreamgirls.

"Michelle was just an absolute trooper," says Dunning.

Smoggie Queens is available to watch in full on BBC iPlayer.