Profile/Graham Norton: The BBC has turned to Graham Norton to inject some life into its limp Saturday night schedule, but will he depart from his familiar brand of risqué comedy, asks Brian Boyd
Vicky Pollard is a 15-year-old delinquent tearaway. Two years ago she had a baby which she promptly swapped with her friend for a Justin Timberlake CD. Vicky's social worker was aghast at what she had done. "Yes, I'm disgusted with myself," said Vicky, "I don't even like Justin Timberlake."
Vicky Pollard is one of the stars of Little Britain, a comedy show which began on BBC2 three weeks ago. It invariably takes any new show three or four programmes to build up a profile and audience but on its first night, Little Britain took in twice as many viewers as Channel 4's long-running and very successful V Graham Norton. Later the same week at the British Comedy awards, Norton's show lost out to the unremarkable ITV show Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway.
As a quick-thinking comic, Norton knew that his decision (announced just this week) to leave Channel 4 for the BBC had been swiftly vindicated. Save for a few specials from Los Angeles, Norton has pulled the plug on his five-nights-a-week show. He will, however, still present a new weekly hour-long programme filmed in New York, to be called NY Graham Norton for Channel 4, beginning in January, until he begins work with the BBC next April on a lucrative two-and-a-half-year deal.
The Corkman has been instructed by the corporation to "sex up" its mainstream Saturday night schedule. Auntie was gushing about the Norton capture: "I'm convinced he will delight viewers of all ages at the heart of the Saturday night schedule," said BBC One controller Lorraine Heggessey, while Jane Lush, BBC controller of entertainment, added "it's been my ambition to work with Graham ever since I took on the entertainment role and that's been no secret. We've spent a lot of time and effort wooing Graham to the BBC and I'm delighted that the deal we've put in place for him suits us both so well."
The corporation is responding to a recent wide-ranging survey by the television industry ratings body, Barb, which showed that Saturday night is now the least-watched evening of television in the UK - Monday is now the most popular, with the soaps pulling in the big figures. Just eight years ago, Saturday night reigned supreme and had a prestige about it; light entertainment shows such as Blind Date and (the admittedly execrable) Noel Edmond's House Party could easily command 20 million viewers. That can't be said of this year's eminently forgettable fare: Brian Conley's Judgement Day, Melanie Sykes's The Vault and Drop the Celebrity; while the return visits to the Fame Academy and Pop Idol formats simply aren't doing the ratings business. ITV is currently ruling the Saturday night roost with Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, the show Norton will have in his sights next April.
Interestingly, the Barb report found that the majority of viewers surveyed said they wanted "more shows suitable for family viewing". Will Norton's glitzy camp image and explicit adult humour have to be sacrificed at the altar of prime-time mainstream sensibilities? Camp humour has travelled a long way from the days of Mr Humphries in a pink suit squealing "I'm Free" in Are You Being Served? and as Paul O'Grady (Lily Savage) and Julian Clary have found, once you sand down the rough edges you can do whatever you want across the light entertainment spectrum - be that presenting Blankety Blank (O'Grady) or even fronting Daz commercials (Clary).
Three years ago Norton resisted a £6-million deal offered by the BBC, saying at the time that as "a shiny Irish poof, Channel 4 give me more freedom to do my own thing". But as Esther Rantzan once found out, there's only so many times you can hold up a root vegetable shaped vaguely like a penis to the camera and expect the audience to collapse from the hilarious mirth of it all. On V Graham Norton the comic has done all the sex toys, has heard all the embarrassing confessional stories and has put camcorders where they were never designed to be put.
Where he excels, and will continue to do so, is in his unique ability to be deliciously rude without being offensive. People forget that he was a stand-up comic, and a very good one, for the best part of 10 years before first appearing on Channel 4. All those one-liners, put downs, improvisational skills and inspired flights of fancy have been hard won over many a year of professional neglect.
Born Graham Walker in Dublin in 1963 he took his great-grandmother's maiden name when the actors union Equity told him they already had a Graham Walker on their books. His father worked for Guinness and travelled a lot so the young Graham was brought up, at various times, in Kilkenny, Tramore and Waterford before settling in Bandon, Co Cork. He still entertains notions of being invited back to his school there, the Bandon Secondary School, to present the school prizes.
He began an English and French degree at UCC but never finished it, preferring to spend his time at college "sitting around drinking lots of coffee and faffing about in one-act Lorca plays". He originally wanted to be a journalist but never fully pursued it. After a while spent living on a hippy commune in California (a time he never really talks about), he enrolled at the London Central School Of Speech and Drama where one day he made a startling (for him) discovery about himself. "It was a very clear moment of self-realisation; it suddenly dawned on me how camp I was."
Believing himself to be too camp to become a serious actor, he decided to become a comic.
This journalist first met him while doing some work for the Guardian newspaper in the mid-1990s. Norton was the barman in the pub across the road from the newspaper and was notorious among the paper's staff for being the most inefficient and rudest barman ever.
"Yes, I was a real bitter old queen in those days," he says now, "going nowhere in my comedy career and working in that bar - the journalists would come in and I would just ignore them, not even serve them."
A year later and sitting in a draughty room at midnight during the Edinburgh Festival with only two other people in the audience, it was quite a shock to see the person I only knew as "the angry Cork barman who hates everybody" come bounding out on to a tiny stage with all the charisma and energetic charm of a Butlin's Red Coat on crack cocaine. The show he did for the three of us that night was basically V Graham Norton without the televisual bells and whistles - he rang up people who had advertised in the "Lonely Hearts" section of the local press and talked extensively about what it was like growing up Protestant and gay in Co Cork - "there was just the one gay bar in Bandon, it was called The Altar Rail - it only served red wine".
Like most Irish comics of the era he went on (after several early misjudged attempts) to receive a Perrier prize nomination for his work at the festival (losing out on the night to The League Of Gentlemen). He's always found it strange that he's seen as a "gay comic" rather than an "Irish comic".
"You'd have all these stories about Ardal O'Hanlon, Dylan Moran and Tommy Tiernan and I'm always the last name, if I'm included at all, when they're talking about Irish comics," he says. "I think it's just a case of British journalists going 'Isn't he Irish as well? Better put him in somewhere near the end'. It doesn't really bother me though". He rarely, if ever, gigs in Ireland, saying, oddly, that he's "too terrified". He points to the fact that having an Irish accent in Britain is as good as being classless - "you don't fit in with their system so you can be who you want to be; back home I just feel a bit . . . exposed". As Irish comics go, he's a kind and decent person.
Since that breakthrough Edinburgh year it's been all shiny suits, single entendres andsmart salaciousness as his TV career has seen him rack up countless Baftas, British Comedy Awards and even an International Emmy (V Graham Norton goes out in the US on the BBC America channel).
He will undoubtedly shine on the BBC come next year if all concerned hold their nerve and find the right format for his wide-ranging abilities. He's got a lot more in his comic armoury than people give him credit for; something the corporation would be wise to tap into. Either way, the unmovable object of mainstream Saturday night television is soon to meet the irresistible force of the man from Bandon.