the bbc cancelled drag race uk while season eight was still airing on iplayer
via PinkNews, HuffPost UK and reality blurred.
Season eight of RuPaul's Drag Race UK premiered last week. New episodes go out on BBC iPlayer every Thursday. It is Thursday.
On Wednesday the BBC confirmed that this season is the last one it will make.
what the bbc actually said
The statement is a small masterpiece of the form. "As the BBC continues to navigate significant financial pressures and deliver the savings required of us, we have had to make some very difficult choices, none of which have been taken lightly." Eight seasons since 2019, plus three of UK vs the World, cancelled in the passive voice by an unnamed spokesperson while the current run is still going out weekly to people who have no idea yet.
And it is not the first difficult choice of the year. The BBC already cut I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl, citing "difficult choices in light of our funding challenges," which is the same sentence with the nouns shuffled. Line them up and the public broadcaster has now dropped essentially every queer entertainment format it had, one individually defensible decision at a time, and collectively a shape you can see from orbit.
world of wonder picks it up
Now the good news, because there is real good news.
On Thursday World of Wonder confirmed the show survives. "Hot off the heels of the iconic Season 8 premiere, a new era of Drag Race UK is on the way!" the company posted. "Starting next Fall, RuPaul's Drag Race UK is heading to its new home on WOW Presents Plus with the series premiere of RuPaul's Drag Race UK All Stars!"
There has never been a UK All Stars. That is a genuine first, arriving in autumn 2027. And the back catalogue travels with it: World of Wonder says all eight seasons of Drag Race UK and all three seasons of UK vs the World will be on WOW Presents Plus almost everywhere, and available to members in the UK for the first time.
what leaving the bbc costs
Read the trade honestly though, because it is a real one. A show that lived on the license fee was free at the point of use for anybody in Britain with a telly and a login. It is now moving behind a subscription. Drag Race UK on the BBC meant a fifteen-year-old in a town with no gay bar could watch drag queens on the same platform as the six o'clock news, filed under normal. That is what a public broadcaster is for, and it is the one thing a niche streamer, however good the show turns out to be, structurally cannot do.
Andy Dehnart at reality blurred asked the question the new era now has to answer: "Will the new era include a winner of the main show who is not white?"
So the queens have a home, autumn 2027 is a long way off, and season eight is on tonight. The correct response to a cancellation notice this week is to go and watch the thing they cancelled.
