PROFILE GRAHAM NORTON:WITH THE BBC needing to calm troubled waters after having to usher its star presenter, Jonathan Ross, out through the workman's entrance, what does the august institution do? In his place it appoints a bed-wetting, cross-dressing gay Irishman who almost became a rent boy.
You might imagine that when Graham Norton begins his Friday-night chat show on BBC1 next month it will be a godsend for
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headline writers, appalled Tory MPs and the disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells brigade. Just how many penis-shaped vegetables will he hold up, how many double entendres will he utter, and how many TV cameras will be put into parts of the body where TV cameras really don’t belong before the corporation dusts off its naughty step (previous occupants: Ross and Russell Brand)?
But nothing is what it seems in TV land. While Ross thrived on his cheeky-chappie image, Norton is a nice boy from Bandon, in Co Cork. Ross’s humour had a recklessness at its core. Norton trades primarily in camp nuances, never the outrageous jokes of the kind that Julian Clary once made about the former British chancellor Norman Lamont.
He is someone who can tell you, sincerely and honestly, that he put his feelings of isolation and foreignness growing up in Bandon down to being a Protestant in a predominantly Catholic area. “It wasn’t until I went to San Francisco that I realised those weren’t Protestant feelings,” he told one interviewer.
San Francisco was also the setting for his aborted career as a rent boy. He had had relationships with women as a teenager, but at the age of 20, and knowing he was gay but “not knowing how to be gay”, he thought becoming a rent boy might help his “initiation”. He answered an ad in a San Francisco paper, but when he found out he would have to “audition” for the pimp he got cold feet.
As for the bed-wetting and cross-dressing, they were both brief childhood episodes. As he explains: “I was a tiny cross-dresser – under four – and my sister had prettier clothes. I was just trying to cheer up a dull outfit.”
But while as a person he may be kind and considerate – the Daily Telegraphuses him as its agony uncle – as a performer he can walk right up to the borders of taste and decency, give a knowing wink, then walk straight back again.
IT WAS FITTING the BBC announced that Norton's current Monday-night chat show will move to Fridays at last weekend's Edinburgh International Television Festival. It was at the city's fringe festival in 1997 that, after years of a career that seemed forever stuck in first gear, Norton earned a nomination for the Perrier comedy award and came to the attention of Channel 4, which made him a household name with his So Graham Nortonshow.
Playing to just a handful of people in a late-night slot, his Edinburgh show that year was like an unplugged version of his later TV show. He would ring up people who had advertised in the lonely-hearts sections of local papers, then turn on the speakerphone. If memory serves, his set included a line about the only gay bar in Bandon – “It was called the Altar Rail.”
He had already appeared on television: in 1996 he made a scene-stealing appearance as Fr Noel Furlong, the irritating "youth Mass" priest, in Father Ted, and in 1997 he won the first of six British Comedy Awards, for a stand-in presenting job on Channel 5.
But there were decades of waiting on tables and pulling pints. After San Francisco, and after considering becoming a news journalist, he enrolled at Central School of Speech & Drama, part of the University of London, where he had an unlikely epiphany. “It was a very clear moment of self-realisation,” he says. “It suddenly dawned on me how camp I was.”
Tired of being cast "as the servant in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard", he decided to up the camp quotient and stage one-man comedy shows. With just a tea towel as a prop he debuted Mother Teresa of Calcutta's Grand Farewell Tour. There's a clip of him from that time in RTÉ's Nighthawksarchives if anyone at Montrose wants to earn some easy money by submitting it to one of those before-they-were-famous shows.
He first staged Mother Teresain a room above the pub he was working in at the time, the Eagle in Clerkenwell – where journalists from the nearby Guardiancongregated. The mention of his name in the paper's newsroom still provokes laughter. Norton was the rudest barman in town.
"I was a real bitter old queen in those days," he says, "going nowhere in my career and working in that bar – I would just ignore the Guardianjournalists, not even serve them."
His attitude to Bandon and Co Cork has softened considerably. Although he had a happy childhood, his teenage years were grim, and he never finished his degree in English and French at University College Cork. But he owns a house in the area and spends a lot of his free time there. He was greatly impressed by the way neighbours rallied around his family when his father died, and he is now a local stalwart who involves himself in community issues, most recently the campaign to get a new cancer unit at Bantry General Hospital.
He finds it odd that whenever there’s a newspaper article about successful Irish comics in Britain – Dara Ó Briain, Ardal O’Hanlon, Tommy Tiernan – his name is never mentioned. It’s as if he’s not an Irish comic but a gay comic, belonging to a different race. But what he finds liberating about Britain is that, in a still class-bound society, nobody can quite place his accent. As far as they’re concerned he could be Co Cork working class or Co Cork aristocracy.
When he moved to the BBC from Channel 4 in 2005, in a big-money transfer, it seemed as if the corporation was intent on squeezing the fizz out of him. With Jonathan Ross still very much in place and Norton's position and function unclear, it seemed that dross was thrown his way merely to justify his lucrative contract. He hosted Strictly Dance Fever– a relatively short-lived offshoot of Strictly Come Dancing– and was then pushed together with Andrew Lloyd Webber for a string of star-search shows that have garnered respectable ratings but have, at best, seen Norton treading water. (Norton says he would love to search for a lead for Jesus Christ Superstar,but only so that he could call it Finding Jesus.) He was even, as seems obligatory, sent off to Africa to make a programme about endangered animals.
WARY OF ROSS'Sterritorial markings, when the BBC finally put him back in a chat-show format, in 2007, he was on BBC2 for the first two years before moving to Monday nights on BBC1 for the past year. Similar in tone and style to his best Channel 4 work, The Graham Norton Showopens with a razor-sharp monologue before he cheerfully cajoles off-message stories from his star guests.
Norton, who is reportedly paid about €2.4 million a year by the BBC – a drop from last year, when his contract was worth about €3 million – has a refreshing couldn’t-care-less attitude to the debate about the money the broadcaster pays its stars.
“The salary is a miracle. I don’t know how I get it,” he says. “But if the BBC has decided that’s my market value, then what kind of moron would go, ‘No, please take half of my salary and invest it in Saturday-morning children’s programmes instead’?”
That pay is likely to be pumped up considerably when he debuts in the Friday-night slot, on October 22nd, but, given a budget- conscious BBC, probably not up to the reported €7 million or so a year that Ross was earning from the corporation. He will also be taking Ross’s Saturday-morning slot on BBC Radio 2 from October 2nd.
Early in his Channel 4 career Norton snubbed a BBC transfer deal, saying the corporation would only constrict his camp style of humour. “As a shiny Irish poof, Channel 4 give me far more freedom to do my own thing.”
Now anchoring one of the most prestigious and most watched slots on British television, the shiny Irish poof will know that freedom, on a TV channel funded by licence-fee payers, comes with responsibilities. And ruthless consequences.
CV Graham Norton
Who? To old friends and family it's his real name, Graham Walker. There was another performer of the same name when he joined Equity, the actors' union, so he chose to use his great-grandmother's name.
Born? Clondalkin, in Dublin, in 1963. His father, who worked for Guinness, travelled a lot. Norton was brought up in Kilkenny and Tramore as well as in Bandon.
New job? The BBC announced this week that he's the new Jonathan Ross. The old one is off to ITV.
ExpectChocolate dildos he's found on a website.
Don't expectPhone calls to Fawlty Towers actors.
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