This Is Why There’s No Cash Prize on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race UK’

Now that RuPaul’s Drag Race UK is underway, we know the truth: it truly is a sickening addition to the the Drag Race family. The queens are the real deal, the looks are right, and the jokes are—okay, a lot of the references go over my American head, but I am still here for them. Come through, trollops and slags! Not a thing was lost in translation—except one thing that may leave audiences familiar with the mother show confused…

What is up with the Drag Race UK prize money honey?

Prize money is a big deal for a reality/competition show, and it’s possibly the biggest deal on RuPaul’s Drag Race. The Drag Race opening credits sequence is just a list of prizes! Season 11’s haul included a “one-year supply of Anastasia Beverly Hills cosmetics” and “a cash prize of $100,000.” The money’s a big motivator on Drag Race in the States, too, with queens frequently commenting on how that cash can get them out of debt (Chi Chi DeVayne filed for bankruptcy before coming on Drag Race!). The prize money’s also a big motivator for queens to go back on All Stars, especially if they competed on an earlier season of the show before the prize money was inflated to $100K.

So, what’s up with the Drag Race UK prize money? Uh…. there is no prize money! Instead, the winning queen gets “whisked off to Hollywood to star in her very own digital series produced by the hit-making team that created RuPaul’s Drag Race.” No sickening supply of beauty products, and no torrential downpour of dollar bills. Just a trip to LA to shoot a web-series, presumably the kind that a lot of the US queens have. And you don’t even have to win Drag Race in the US to get a World of Wonder web-series! Just ask Shuga Cain, who got her own show before Season 11 winner Yvie Oddly! Prize money’s a big deal in the Drag Race world, so why won’t the UK queen get pounds of pounds?

The reason is both logistical and cultural, as explained in this 2016 post from Mark Lawson at The Guardian. If you’re a fan of British reality competition shows, then you’re already familiar with this. It’s why the prize on The Great British Baking Show is a cake stand.

Here’s the tea: back when British TV started importing game shows in the ’50s, the rather conservative decision-makers at the time balked at the idea of giving away loads of money. For example, instead of giving away $64,000 in their adaptation of the US game show The $64,000 Question, the UK version gave away roughly $2,000 (or 64K sixpences). That’s the cultural reason why Drag Race UK has no prize money: British game shows have always shied away from giving out loads of cash because it’s just not… proper, I guess?

And then there’s the logistical reason, which probably affects Drag Race UK more so than the cultural one (after all, the competition shows aired on BBC competitor ITV give away cash prizes now). But Drag Race UK is part of the BBC, which is a publicly funded television network (if you have a TV, you have to pay a “license fee” in order to watch TV on it). Because of that, the BBC can’t give one person a life-changing amount of cash that was provided by every TV-owner in the UK. It wouldn’t be proper, sure, but it’d also shady. Like, I can’t imagine how annoyed I’d be if part of the money I paid for my various streaming services went to the winner of The Voice, a game show I’ve never watched and still do not understand.

So, that’s why the prize on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK is a trip to Hollywood and a web-series. But really, and this has always been the case in the States too, the prize is being on Drag Race and seeing those bookings roll in and your appearance fee go up. And no matter what the UK queens win, the audience wins because we get to watch them stunt every Thursday on WOW Presents Plus at 3 p.m. ET.

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Stream RuPaul's Drag Race UK on WOW Presents Plus