Tom Read Wilson praises ‘special’ Martin Kemp for speaking gay language Polari

Tom Read Wilson has heaped praise on his I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! co-star Martin Kemp after learning he could speak the gay slang language Polari.

Celebs Go Dating star Wilson appeared in the ITV jungle in 2025 alongside Spandau Ballet‘s Kemp, and other famous faces including Aitch and Shona McGarty.

Speaking to Paul C Brunson on the We Need To Talk podcast, Wilson said: “Oh my God, Martin is fascinating.

“He can speak Polari, and Polari was a secret gay language, pre-decriminalisation of homosexuality. People could speak it so that, mainly, if Hilda Handcuffs, which was what they’d call the law, were around to go under the radar and still say what they’d like to say.”

Wilson explained that in the camp, Kemp had told him “bona lallies”, which means “great legs” in Polari.

“I said, ‘You don’t speak Polari?’ and he said, ‘Yes, in fact I wrote a thriller, and one of my characters only spoke Polari,'” Wilson said.

‘I thought, what a special man’

“He said he grew up listening to Round the Horne and Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick used to speak Polari on that. He said, ‘We’d listen every Sunday,’ and then he said, ‘I believe that political acts are often felt about 10 years after the fact.'”

Kemp cited the decriminalisation of homosexuality which happened in England and Wales 1967, with the musical movement of New Romantics coming in 1977.

Wilson said Kemp told him they’d go to a club called Blitz “where there was no gender, there was no orientation”, and the title New Romantics came because they loved Byron and Wilde, and “those androygnous poets who occupied myriad spaces and identities”.

He went on: “I thought, what a special man. We had so many conversations about his life, and those revelations in his life, as they happened, and how they always happen, happening at the same time as the arts, and there was therefore a movement.

“I loved him, oh my goodness.”

What is Polari?

Polari was a form of slang used predominantly in the UK among gay people, though also by some groups like merchant navy sailors, circus performers and sex workers.

It included many words – such as the above mentioned “bona” and “lally”, as well as “cod” which meant awful, “lattie” which meant house, and “eek” which meant face.

Other words, such as “naff” have become common in modern language, though its Polari meaning of tacky has evolved to a more general meaning of bad.

The language also had gender changes, where “he” might be changed to “she”, and masculine names might be swapped to a feminine version.

It started to slip out of use in London by the late 1960s, with the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England coming with the Sexual Offences Act 1967.

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