Having spent months in non-committal committee meetings, suddenly we got the call. Channel 4 wanted to do a pilot and, should that go well, a series of six shows that would go out at 10.30 p.m. on Friday nights. After the initial celebrations had died down, we thought about the challenge we had to face. We had always imagined this show as a fairly low-key chat show that might play on a Wednesday or Thursday night, but they were asking us to take over from the slot that Eurotrash had been so successful in. Patently that post-pub Friday-night audience would need a little more than some Irish poof bantering with Simon Callow about his latest stage triumph. Kevin Lygo was obviously slightly nervous about his decision because he kept telling us, ‘This is an entertainment show – not a chat show!’ Thrilled as we were to be making any show, this did strike us as slightly odd, given that all we had ever pitched to them was a chat show.
Because nobody told me that I wasn’t supposed to, I showed up for every pre-production meeting that was arranged. I’ve since learnt that this is not the norm. All the technical types with long hair and big bunches of keys would really prefer never to meet the presenter of a show, and if they have to then at least let it be after all the truly important work is over. People walked in for meetings about the set design or the graphics and were slightly taken aback to see me sat at the table with a cup of coffee and lots of pictures I’d ripped out of magazines. I’m sure if you talked to these people they might speak about me in terms of being a control freak, and I suppose they’re right, but the way I look at it is that I’m the one fronting the show, so if it is a disaster I’d prefer it to be my fault.
A great deal of time was spent talking about what to call this new programme. The Channel and Graham Stuart would have been perfectly happy with a straightforward The Graham Norton Show, but I had a very strong gut feeling that my name shouldn’t be in the title. For some reason I had decided that it would be unlucky, and I also had that weird thing where although I wanted to jump up and down waving my arms and shouting ‘look at me!’, I didn’t want people to think that was all I was doing. I wanted to call it after a bar in Los Angeles called the Frolic Room, but when I suggested this at a meeting the expression on the faces of the other people told me that I might as well have just let off a big fart. More suggestions please. The Lock-In? Too negative. Last Orders? Someone else had already used it. At one meeting, the writer Jez Stephenson was joking around because when I had guest-hosted The Jack Docherty Show, it had been called Not The Jack Docherty Show. ‘Why don’t we call it The Very Graham Norton Show?’ he asked. Completely Graham Norton? So Graham Norton? We laughed and moved the conversation on to something else.
Finally I realised that I was not going to convince Graham or Channel 4 of any title that didn’t include my name, and people seemed to actually like So Graham Norton. It was decided. I now realise that if I was going to lose any fight about my own show then this was the one to lose. Ever after, if there was any dispute about anything about the show, I could use my trump card – ‘It’s supposed to be So Graham Norton, and I don’t think that’s very me.’ I’m sure there were times when the Channel 4 executives deeply regretted the day they inadvertently gave me such power.
We worked out of offices on Oxford Street that had previously been occupied by some sort of bucket-shop travel agent. It became clear that they had shut down and vacated the building quite suddenly given the number of times someone would poke their head around the door looking for their tickets to Uganda.
Graham Stuart and I put together a small team of people, some of whom still work with me today. The worry was that we had yet to find a producer. Graham couldn’t do it full time because he was looking after other projects at United, and we weren’t having much luck. I suppose it was always going to be hard to find a talented, successful producer who had the time and the inclination to risk their reputation on an untried performer doing a totally new show in the relatively low-profile summer season. We worked on confirming all the elements of the show, not really mentioning to Channel 4 that with weeks to go there was still no one to produce it.
Being the host of a show after guest-hosting someone else’s or being just a guest on various panel games took quite a lot of getting used to. I didn’t feel any different, but it was clear from the outset that I was the boss. The first meeting I had with the team was very strange. I was introduced to them all and that was fine, but then as the meeting went on I noticed that if I spoke everyone shut up and turned to look at me. If I made the slightest little joke they all laughed . . . for just a little too long. I’m sure this still happens in meetings now, but what worries me is that I’ve just stopped noticing. I remember being really upset when someone on the team organised a barbecue one weekend and I wasn’t invited. It felt like a punch in the stomach, but then I realised that this was the way it was going to be from now on. I was the boss, and who invites their boss to a party? They wanted to have fun, and I imagined them all standing around eating their burnt raw sausages having a great time ripping the shit out of me. There is still an invisible, unavoidable glass wall between me and the people I work with, and anyone who pretends it doesn’t exist is an idiot. Of course I am extremely close to some of the team, but no matter how drunk we get, our work relationship continues to hang around us like the smell of dog shit stuck to someone’s shoe.
Finally Peter Kessler, the man who had produced The Mrs Merton Show, was persuaded to come on board as producer. Looking back, he had an awful job. He was joining the process really late so that most of the big decisions had already been made, and he was sharing an office with me, and I had tasted control and it had affected me the way the taste of human blood can send a shark into a killing frenzy. I really enjoyed his company, but we continually clashed, which involved, it has to be said, deeply unprofessional behaviour from me.
Making a pilot show is a horrible experience. The Channel wants to see exactly what the show will be like, but it is impossible to make it the same as a show that is going to be transmitted precisely because it isn’t going to be. The atmosphere in the audience is invariably oddly low-key because they know they can’t sit at home looking for their own face in the crowd – ‘Oh, doesn’t my jumper look red?’ – but the hardest part is getting guests. Who would want to be on the pilot for a show hosted by someone they don’t know? We were very lucky to get Davina McCall. She looked great and told a very funny story about when she was hosting God’s Gift and one of the male contestants stripped down to a thong, and thinking he was indeed God’s gift turned around to wiggle his arse at the girls only to reveal a little piece of poo waving hello to the pretty ladies.
Our second guest was slightly less successful. He was a famous American psychic, but sadly he is only a celebrity in America, and even sadder on so many levels he seems to have stopped being a psychic everywhere. Scott knew him from LA (dead celebrity circles) and swore blind that he did have amazing powers, but nothing was in evidence that night in London Studios. He approached the audience.
‘You’re planning to move house.’
‘No.’
‘Mmm, well, you will move house.’
Or:
‘You’re planning to change careers. What do you do now?’
‘Nothing. I’m unemployed.’
And so it went on. There was one moment of excitement when he correctly identified a man as a lawyer, but later we found out that the guy worked for Channel 4 and they had met in the green room.
Anyone who saw the pilot and then the first few episodes would have noticed one big difference. In the pilot I – yes, it was all down to me! – decided that instead of a house band I would have a woman called Lorraine Bowen. She is still on the cabaret circuit and if you get the chance to go and see her, you must, she is brilliant. She plays a tiny Yamaha organ that she balances on an ironing board and she sings inspired little ditties about things like making apple crumble. I love her. Her job was to introduce the guests with specially written songs. I thought she did a great job and
gave the show a really odd feel. I suppose I was still back in my Mother Teresa mindest of making sure that if something wasn’t funny at least it was mad in a Sarah Brightman kind of way.
The pilot was edited and given to Channel 4 to watch. They had lots of problems with the whole thing. They didn’t like the lighting, they wanted the set to be changed – but in terms of content the only thing they didn’t like was lovely, brilliant Lorraine. Maybe I should have fought harder for her – Scott certainly thought so – but the pilot hadn’t gone that well and I wasn’t feeling overly confident about the whole thing. I felt if I gave in to the Channel on this one issue they might leave us alone to get on with the show. Lorraine was out and I felt like a shit. The good news, though, was that our compromises and changes had worked and Channel 4 gave the go-ahead for a first series.
Ben Devlin was the associate producer on the show, and he took over the role of guest booking quite early on. There are many jobs in television, some more glamorous than others, but guest booking is just below picking up the shit from Wendy Richards’s dog. I’m not quite sure how Ben managed it, but for our very first show we had the dream line-up of Ivana Trump, Kathy Burke, Sooty, Sweep and a special guest appearance by Gordon the Gopher. The day before, we heard that Ivana wouldn’t stay for the whole show – in fact, more than that, we found out that Ivana was only doing the show on her way from Waterloo, where she was arriving on the Eurostar, to a restaurant she was having dinner in. It did sort of help to put everything in perspective: for me, the biggest night in my life; for her, a mere pit stop for make-up and hair.
It was around that time that I had my first, and I’m happy to report, last panic attack, or what I believe to have been one. I woke up and lay in bed not wanting to wake Scott, and I was filled with the feeling of panic (you can see why I might have thought it was a panic attack). Somehow it was related to the new show and all the pressures it was putting on me or, more accurately, all the pressure I was putting on myself. I lay there twitching and listening to the warm rhythm of Scott’s breathing and literally thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to feel like this. Nothing is worth this.’ As calmly as I could, I worked through what the worst-case scenario could possibly be, and as far as I could work out that would be ending up back working in a restaurant, and as bad as that was it had never made me wake up feeling like this. I resolved to never feel like that again, and miraculously I never have. If you suffer from panic attacks I’m sure you found that little tale unbearably twee and smug, but for me, having waited for success for such a long time, it was a strangely liberating thought to embrace failure and realise that it wasn’t the end of the world.
Nowadays I am universally nice to all my guests because I want to keep them happy, and also from a practical point of view I need so many of them, but in that first show I was quite tough on Ivana Trump. She had various business projects on the go and I asked her if she felt a new casino was really what Bosnia needed right now, and then I went on to be rude about her daughter’s name, Ivanka. Looking back, I was one. Kathy Burke was hilarious, but because we had packed our forty-minute show with so much puppet business her interview was edited down to almost nothing. Lessons were learnt.
I watched the first show go out sitting beside Scott. Almost before it was over the phone rang. It was my agent Melanie – you may have gathered by now that very few other people call me. She had watched the show at TalkBack with some man who produced Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith’s show. She handed the phone over to him and after briefly congratulating me, he started to criticise the way it had been edited. I had to agree because I had thought the same myself, but nevertheless, having someone tear your first TV show apart isn’t quite what you want while your theme music is still ringing in your ears. It would be another few months before I fully realised the significance of that phone call.
That first series was full of highs and lows. Guests like Lorraine Kelly and Stephen Fry were brilliant, but other people proved difficult. Kylie Minogue seemed incapable of telling one of her own anecdotes. At the time I thought it was because I was gay and so not flirting with her properly, but I’ve since seen her do it on other shows. She smiles and laughs, but never really engages with the interviewer. I guess she is just happier when she is singing, as am I.
David Blaine was a fairly disastrous guest. At the time very few people in Britain had heard of him, but my producer Peter was a real magic buff and Channel 4 had just bought his first Street Magic special. We booked him. Given what we had seen him do on his TV show, he did turn out to be a disappointment.
‘Can you do the levitation for us?’
‘In the studio in front of the audience? No.’
Later in the day I was in a lift with him when he decided to thrill me with his levitation spectacular. It was like some dreary fifth former in the dinner queue, trying to impress his friends. In the end, all he felt able to do for us on the show were some card tricks. Fine. What he hadn’t bargained for was a British audience. We have been brought up with Paul Daniels and the like, so when David asked someone ‘Is that your card?’ he got a simple, unexcited ‘Yes’. After all, it would have been a pretty piss-poor trick if it hadn’t been your card. David, however, was used to the good people of some of New York’s less affluent neighbourhoods, who had never seen a card trick before, screaming and calling him the devil before they ran off into the night. Barbara from Maida Vale was never going to do that. David started to lose his confidence, dropping cards on the floor and fluffing his patter. The audience became restless. They had never heard of this American magician and now they knew why. From that night forth I haven’t been able to bear the man or the power his self-fuelled hype has over a mindless media. Pulling a rabbit out of a hat is a magic trick, not eating is a diet.
There was one night in that first series when the show seemed to really hit its stride and show us how fantastic it could be when it worked. We were in our third week, and the guests were, perhaps, my favourite combination ever – Grace Jones and Judith Chalmers.
I already knew that I should be careful with the unique Miss Jones. The night before, Scott and I had met with her briefly in the Met bar to talk about the show. As expected, she kept us waiting for quite a long time, so Scott and I had a few cocktails. I had never been in the Met bar before, and given all the stories I had read about celebrity customers and raucous excess I was slightly disappointed to find it a bit like a posh youth club. Finally Grace appeared and we were ushered to a booth. We talked briefly about the format of the show, and I did general gushing. We were all a bit distracted by two skinny kids with long hair dancing in front of us.
‘Is that a boy or a girl?’ boomed Grace.
In fairness I couldn’t tell.
‘Maybe it’s an hermaphrodite’ she concluded.
Scott asked Grace if she had heard the rumours about the famous Hollywood actress who was supposed to be one.
Now, this is the moment where it all went a bit wrong.
Grace said, ‘I don’t think so,’ and then continued, ‘People say it about me all the time.’
I don’t know why, but for some reason Scott didn’t hear the second bit of what she had said and he blithely leaned over to her and said apropos of the actress; ‘Well, there’s no smoke without fire.’
Too late for me to interject and explain to Grace that he wasn’t in fact referring to her. The globe-like eyes rolled back in her head, she pulled her neck to its full extent and glared at a clueless Scott. ‘Bull. Shit,’ she snarled with the sort of menace that could have cured severe constipation. We left shortly after that.
The next night she prowled on set determined to make an impact, in turns flirting with me and then trying to strangle me. Slowly she calmed down and simply began to enjoy herself. By the time I called a man in New York who cleaned apartments in the nude, both the audience and myself felt as if anything could happen. It was like the best nights at the Edinburgh Festival. He refused to believe that it was really Grace Jones talkin
g down the phone to him until finally she started singing the chorus of ‘La Vie En Rose’. Now, I’ve always been a fan of Grace Jones, even before I saw her on the back of a truck all those years before in San Francisco, but I’d always assumed that her singing voice was somehow created by the record producers. That was stupid of me. Her deep, pure voice sent a shiver through me. I have goosebumps just thinking about it. There was also the undeniable thrill of thinking about how much my life had changed since I had stood at the side of the street in a huge crowd trying to catch a glimpse of her. Now she was singing in my ear.
I just assumed that the second half of the show would be an anticlimax, but I was so wrong. Judith trotted down the stairs in a bright pink suit and proceeded to tell the nation that she didn’t wear knickers. Then, in a surreal moment she and Grace started chatting about the pros and cons of wearing thongs. I just sat back and listened to them and thought to myself, ‘I like my show.’
The other thing that made the whole night really special for me was that my parents were there. They had never seen me do anything, and to begin with their presence made me more nervous and self-conscious, but soon I had to forget about them and just get on with it. Occasionally I would glance over to where they were sitting, and I could see them laughing. Without doubt that must have been one of the coolest feelings in the world. After the show I felt we had a new-found respect for each other. It was as if for the first time in my life I felt like an adult around my parents, and they saw me as one.
In the green room my mother made a beeline for Judith Chalmers and they chatted on like old friends. Meanwhile, in another corner of the room, Grace Jones, who before the show had requested Cristal champagne and platters of sushi, was tucking into sausage rolls and glasses of fairly rough red wine. I turned to my father.
‘Would you like to meet Grace Jones?’
So Me Page 17