by Queer icons including UK endurance race Schoolgirl Ella Vaday (Nick Colier), former England rugby star and LGBTQ+ ally Ben Cohen, and Princess Diana’s gay former butler Paul Burrell have joined the ITV cast. The Real Full Monty: Jingle Balls this week to raise money and awareness for UK cancer charities.
The festive-themed event, which has been an annual ITV Christmas show since 2017, featured UK stars including the likes of Gemma Collins and Coronation StreetVictoria Ekanoye, stripping naked in front of a crowd to raise money for cancer awareness charities. The televised event also saw an all-star cast of celebrities demonstrating, with their naked bodies, how to perform cancer self-exams.
Each of the stars appearing in the recent ITV event has been affected, in one way or another, by cancer over the last year.
Nick Colier, best known for his drag character, Ella Vaday, rose to fame when they appeared in the third series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. After winning four ‘maxi’ challenges throughout the season, Vaday placed second in the competition. In 2022, Colier/Vaday spoke about her mother’s battle with breast cancer.
“My mother recently had a mastectomy and is still undergoing treatment for breast cancer,” Vaday said in an interview with rosanews in 2022. “He was correctly diagnosed in October. She had been worried about her breasts for quite some time, but she kept it to herself.”
He endurance race Since then, the star has taken part in a series of events to raise funds and awareness for breast cancer research, including a Race For Life event, which Vaday attended in full force.
In addition to raising awareness about cancer research, Vaday said participating in The Real Full Monty: Jinge Balls It also especially helped them with body confidence.
“My body confidence is something I’ve always struggled with,” Vaday said. Attitude. “I think people would be surprised to know that. But I’ve never felt particularly comfortable going back to school days, in a locker room, for example. I hated that environment. I don’t like sports, so for someone like Ben Cohen, who was used to a locker room, [he] He doesn’t think about that. Whereas for me, and maybe it’s because I’m also a gay man, I don’t tend to spend a lot of time naked with strangers in any aspect of my life.
“I think body dysmorphia will always exist,” Nick added. “I feel more confident than ever right now about how I look and how I feel. I think it’s because I’m always in a dance studio, looking in the mirror and comparing myself to the next guy at the audition. It was nice to talk about those feelings with other people in the room. I feel like we really bonded and sat around with completely naked robes underneath. And I’m sitting there with Paul Burrell and Ben Cohen on beanbag chairs completely naked, like it’s normal. It was pretty funny! Vaday concluded.
Ella Vaday was joined by other LGBTQ+ icons in the recent ITV Christmas special, including former England rugby star and former gay ally Ben Cohen.
Cohen, now 45, retired from the English rugby scene in 2011 but has since advocated for a number of causes, including cancer research and combating homophobia and bullying, which he tackled with his organization now closed charity, Ben Cohen StandUp Foundation.
Cohen has been involved in the promotion since he was diagnosed clinically deaf as a result of his tinnitus. Similarly, he has been active in raising funds and awareness for cancer treatment following his ex-wife’s cancer diagnosis earlier this year.
While Cohen identifies as straight, the former rugby star has had a large LGBTQ+ following for years. In a 2014 interview with Mirror, Cohen explained: “I was completely unaware that there were gay fans until about seven or eight years ago. I received an unexpected message from a French guy, Laurance, from Paris… he had created a fan page in my honor on Facebook.
“So I checked and there were 37,000 members. When I scrolled down, I noticed that they were all men. Apparently I had become a gay icon!
While we’re sure that Cohen’s charitable work combating homophobia and bullying has something to do with his status as a “gay icon,” another likely source comes from Cohen’s father, who died in 2000 after suffering fatal injuries while he was trying to protect an assault victim at Eternity Nightclub in Northampton, which he ran.
Cohen said that after his father’s passing, he connected with his gay fans who were “suffering the same kind of pain and anguish” due to homophobia.
Ella Vaday and Cohen similarly teamed up on The Complete Monty: Jingle Balls by another queer British personality, Paul Burrell.
Burrell, now 65, is best known for being the former butler to Princess Diana of Wales. Last year, Burrell was scheduled to appear in an All-Stars version of I’m a celebrity… Get me out of here! However, after completing the necessary medical checks to appear on the show, Burrell was diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer.
Upon hearing the news of his diagnosis, Burrell told him rosanews: “I sat there for a while, actually it must have been about 10 seconds, but it seemed like an eternity, and I said: [the doctor], ‘Can you tell me that again? Because she didn’t go in at all. Are you saying I have cancer? And he said, ‘Yes, I am.'”
Fortunately, Burrell is now in remission and is using his platform to help other gay men who have been diagnosed with cancer, like him, by talking about testing and sex.
While Burrell did not come out publicly as gay until 2017, he said rosanews who believed Princess Diana was very aware of her LGBTQ+ identity while working for her, stating that her sexuality has always been an “implicit” part of who she is.
When asked if she thought Princess Diana would have accepted her sexuality, Burrell said: “Yes, because she never saw sexuality in anyone. “She never saw race in anyone, she never saw color in anyone.”
“She saw people and saw me as a person and said, ‘I have the ability to look inside you and see who you are,’ and she liked what she saw, and that’s why I stayed so long.” Burrell concluded, referring to her ten years of service as Diana’s personal butler from 1987 until her death in 1997.
Princess Diana was known and loved for her acceptance and celebration of the LGBTQ+ community, particularly for opening the UK’s first specialist HIV/AIDS unit at London’s Middlesex Hospital in 1987.
Plus Nick Colier (Ella Vaday), Ben Cohen and Paul Burrell, other UK stars who appeared on this week’s show The Real Full Monty: Jingle Balls The Christmas special on ITV included media personality Gemma Collins, The only way is Essex star Pete Wicks, TV presenter Julia Bradbury, singer Colleen Nolan, dancer Ashley Banjo, Coronation Street’s Victoria Ekanoye and German ice skater Vanessa Bauer.
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