A gay pub near where I lived put on drag acts. One day, the pianist didn’t turn up. The landlady said, ‘You play the piano don’t you? I’ll give you two quid to play for the act?’ So I did, and became the regular pianist. “

He was born in Rutherglen, South Lanarkshire, the eldest child of Sarah (nee Rae) and George Logan, who worked in the motor industry. There were theatrical cousins on his father’s side and theirs was a musical household, with young George enchanted by the Tchaikovsky recordings he heard on the radio. 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."

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His parents bought him a piano and he started taking lessons from the age of seven – by 15 he was being classically trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music. His formal education took place concurrently at Rutherglen academy and then the University of Glasgow, where he studied music and English.

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. Get the latest celebrity gossip and telly news sent straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily Showbiz newsletter here . READ NEXT: Although I'd heard of people in the 1950s who had got into trouble for being in a gay relationship, I never knew of any in my time. That they didn't pursue people in relationships was something that came to my attention when I got into trouble with the law - my father was told by a police officer that the higher-ups had said not to pursue people who had private gay relationships, just to keep an eye out for gatherings." You can picture it, the Bonnie and Clyde of Glasgow and a bloody sailor’s handbag,” he laughs. “When my father bailed us out, the copper said to him, ‘We are a little concerned about the relationship between your son, who is 19, and this man who is 28, because we realised they share a bedsit and they also share a bed.’ He continues, “They then asked, ‘Have you ever been in a gay bar?’ And I thought, ‘There are such places?’ I was very naive. So they took me to a gay bar and everything changed. All the burdens I’d felt, this great pressure to go out with a girl to fit the mould, had gone. In the past I’d groped around places on the fringes, in that very malodorous public toilets way, and thought, ‘Is this what my life is going to be?’ Suddenly it wasn’t, there were bars where people socialised and they were all gay… and nobody cared. It was like God had given me a huge gift, that there was a way through life for me that I’d never anticipated.”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.” Despite his new found freedom, life in Glasgow still held dangers. Gangs hung out on every street corner and it didn’t do to be too obvious.”You did all your camp stuff when you were in your group or at a party, on the street you had to screw the nut a wee bit, that is to say, you developed a kind of supernatural sensitivity as to when it was the time to ‘let it out’ and when to ‘keep it in,’ and I did that. 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.” We lived in a bedsit and there were two American sailors in the basement room. Based at the Holy Loch they were only in Glasgow at weekends. One day, one of them left his bag, a beautiful leather bag, on the doorstep. George recalls those early years in his new book, A Boy Called Audrey, which charts his life growing up as a gay man in the Scotland of the 1960s. It's a charming, funny and thought-provoking read from the entertainer who was born and raised in Rutherglen, a small coal-mining town in South Lanarkshire, and a place where he had always stood out from the crowd.

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. Although I knew I was something, the word gay was not one I would have known," he explains, adding with a mischievous grin, "Oh, I knew I was an alien... I just wasn't sure what planet I belonged to. 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." |Although I knew I was something, the word gay was not one I would have known,” he explains, adding with a mischievous grin, “Oh, I knew I was an alien… I just wasn’t sure what planet I belonged to.

A Boy Called Audrey

Having encountered Fyffe on the scene in 1970 they – at Fyffe’s suggestion – formed a double act. The original conception was that Fyffe would play a retired opera singer and Logan her male pianist, but as they developed it the musical inserts became duets and Fyffe suggested it might be funnier if Logan, too, dressed as a woman – and so Dr Evadne Hinge was born.