Central to The Naked Civil Servant’s critical success and enduring popular (though perhaps cult) appeal is the irreverent wit, flamboyant charm, and tough-minded individualism of Crisp himself. Born Dennis Pratt on Christmas Day 1908 to very ordinary, middle-class parents living in a suburb of London, Crisp went on to cut a larger-than-life figure who openly flouted society’s rules in his everyday behavior and demeanor. In hair dyed with henna, and in lipstick and mascara, he risked assault on the streets of London daily to openly flaunt his effeminacy. At times he experienced violence, and though taken before the courts for soliciting, he was never convicted.

Associating with London’s more Bohemian set, he passed from job to job, including designing book covers and teaching tap-dancing (even though he was still learning himself). He was also a prostitute for six months, but claimed he did this because he was looking for love rather than for the money. Exempted from military service during World War II due to his homosexuality, he took a job at an art-school as a nude model, becoming a “naked civil servant.”

As a model he could simply be himself, and it was being himself that characterized both his homosexuality and his life more generally. He never openly campaigned for gay rights, and was later to be much criticized by activists for his individualistic stance, as well as for perpetuating a homosexual stereotype of campness, rather than showing solidarity with a wider gay movement. In his own view, he just wanted to be accepted for the individual that he was.

His defiance in the face of establishment and social prejudice was marked by mock incredulity, gritty passiveness, and perhaps even pacifism. As an individual, raconteur, aphorist, and wit, and with nobleness and gentility of manner, Crisp was the quintessential eccentric English gentleman. As such, he lived in a room in London’s Chelsea which had, notoriously, never been cleaned. In the autobiography he was commissioned to write in 1968 he stated that “after the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”

After the book’s publication and modest sales, Crisp attracted some attention and held a one-man stage-show. Around the same time, the dramatist Philip Mackie began to try unsuccessfully to interest producers in making a film based on Crisp’s book; he would continue to be unsuccessful for four years. Also turned down by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the project was finally given the go-ahead by Thames Television, one of the franchised program companies that made up part of the Independent Television (ITV) Network in Britain.

Under the direction of Jack Gold, with Mackie’s screenplay, the television production of The Naked Civil Servant took an idiosyncratic approach to its unconventional subject matter. Despite the gloom of Edwardian England into which Crisp was born and the austerity of the post-war years, and despite the perpetual menace of violence, the tone of the production is upbeat. Boasting a jaunty score by Carl Davis, and interspersed with ironic intertitles, the episodic narrative is propelled by an all-knowing and wry voice-over by John Hurt playing Crisp. In one memorable scene, a gang of working-class “roughs” run amok after a young Crisp calls their leader a closet “queer” to his face. The subsequent intertitle and epiphanic voice-over notes in mock surprise: “Some roughs are really queer, and some queers are really rough.”

Yet despite the humor, the episodic quality of the narrative also provides it with a degree of pathos. Time passes in great leaps, but Crisp remains central in his staunch yet lonely defiance against life’s vicissitudes. It is this quality that seems to give Crisp’s quest for self-determination a heroic edge. Although cautioned in some quarters against the dangers of playing a gay role—still considered risky to a career at that time— John Hurt, a leading British actor, stated that it was the sense that Crisp was a hero that helped him decide to take the role.

Interestingly, it may have been a combination of humor, individualism and heroism that made The Naked Civil Servant, and its potentially controversial subject matter, more palatable to a mainstream television audience. The Independent Broadcasting Authority—at that time Britain’s commercial television industry regulator, which awarded television franchises—was so concerned about a possible public backlash against the program that it commissioned a special survey among a representative sample of the national audience on the morning after its first transmission. Ratings indicated that The Naked Civil Servant was viewed in about 3.5 million homes, and from its survey sample surmised that 85 percent of the audience did not find the material shocking, while almost half felt they understood and sympathized with Crisp’s difficulties.

What viewers may have responded to positively is perhaps not the program’s depiction of homosexuality per se. It is an often-cited cliché that the British always like to support the “underdog.” In this sense, viewer empathy might lie with Crisp both as an entertaining English eccentric, on the one hand, and on the other, as an “everyman” figure who faces up to life’s trials and tribulations with a certain British stoicism, “stiff-upper-lip” determination, and a self-deprecating sense of humor.

Crisp introduced the first transmission of The Naked Civil Servant in person, and was subsequently propelled further into the limelight in Britain and abroad; he was essentially famous for being infamous. He moved to New York in 1980 and wrote various books and articles, and appeared in numerous television programs and documentaries. Crisp died on November 21, 1999, on the eve of a sold-out British tour of his one-man show, and he was remembered with much affection in obituaries.