In the week after a seismic General Election that shookWestminster and brought the ornamental china crashing down in certain outlying regions, it's good to know the under-fire BBC still has a clear idea of what unites we Britons.

Our love of drag queens, for instance.

So effusive and deep-rooted is this love, apparently, that it's fast being monetised, allowing an army of sequinned entrepreneurs to build mini-empires. Either that or the producers of Drags To Riches (BBC Radio 4, Monday, 11am) thought the programme title so good they determined to find the facts to fit. It does happen.

Whatever the reason, first stop for presenter Kim Normanton was the Music Hall Tavern in Arrecife, Lanzarote. There she found Blackpool market stall worker-turned-drag entrepreneur Lee Sanderson applying carpet glue to his false eyelashes back stage. Sanderson runs a string of drag clubs across the Canary Islands and in any given year can expect to put 90,000 bums on 90,000 seats. When he arrived 20 years ago there was nothing. Sanderson saw his first drag queen when he sneaked into a local pub aged 13. "He was being respected. He was controlling an audience," he said. "And that pub was making a lot of money."

One reason for the rise of drag as a money-spinning enterprise is the recession, said Walt Utz, founder of the globe-trotting Supreme Fabulettes. People want to forget their troubles for an evening - and what better way to do it than by watching a man in a dress sing I'm Every Woman? Another boom area, said Utz, is gay weddings. The Fabulettes, who style themselves as a 1960s girl band, have toured from New York to the Seychelles. They've even been to Wales.

Normanton's final empire-builder was Amy Redmond of Sink The Pink, which puts on drag balls for cross-dressers in 3000-capacity venues. Some of the partygoers have beards and hairy legs, and many don't do "the tuck", the eye-watering manoeuvre required to give what's known in drag circles as "a smooth line" (the details are best left hazy). But what isn't hazy is this: where there's drag, there's brass now as well - and not just on the necks of the performers.