Former Conservative MP Gyles Brandreth is to don a bra, stockings and high heels to play Lady Bracknell in a musical version of Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest.
Brandreth, 63, who now works as a reporter on BBC's The One Show, will star at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in December.
Once famous for sporting silly sweaters on TVam, he said: "I'm not doing this in drag, as it were. We live in a world where we now have colour-blind casting and gender-blind casting.
"This is very definitely not drag, not pantomime; this is Earnest the musical and I'm being engaged to play Lady Bracknell, full-stop. This won't be a caricature.
"When I was an MP, I regularly had people coming to my surgery looking for gender realignment - it's a serious issue, so I'm quite sensitive and aware of it.
"My wife has chosen my look for this. She is a historian and produced for me some marvellous photographs of the late Queen Mary (King George V's wife) and said 'This is the look you need', because Queen Mary didn't change her look from the 1890s until her death in 1953.
"Queen Mary would hardly have worn any make-up at all, she would not have put on a whole load of slap - this is not Joan Collins as Lady Bracknell, excellent as she would be, I'm sure.
"I hope you will see a handsome woman in her late fifties or early sixties. The other night my wife saw Maggie Smith in a trailer for Downton Abbey and thought it was me in a TV ad for Earnest."
Brandreth first saw Earnest as a workshop production in Barnes, where he lives, last year, with an actress playing Lady Bracknell. It has music by Adam McGuinness and Zia Moranne, and lyrics by Douglas Livingstone. He said: "Before seeing it I thought 'The Importance is a great play - don't tinker about! Why add music?' But what's brilliant about these songs is that they take the story on. It's not like the play with songs plonked on top; they help move the story forward."
He claimed there was an element of destiny in his decision to appear in an Oscar Wilde-related production: "As a child, I lived with my family in a house opposite where Oscar Wilde's mother had lived, and round the corner from where Oscar and his wife had lived. The first non-fiction book I ever read, at the age of six, was The Trials Of Oscar Wilde."
He added: "I feel born to play Lady Bracknell. I feel playing this part that I'm coming home."
