‘Yes, like a showbiz version of the Easter story, she’s back!’
The crowd roared their approval and everything was all right. They knew that I was just another fan and I wasn’t trying to make the evening about me.
The welcome Liza herself got was incredible: a solid wall of applause, approval and love. At first her voice was a little tentative, but you could almost see her feeding off the crowd’s adoration until by the end of the show she was a genuine knockout. She got a spontaneous standing ovation and I slowly made my way backstage to add my congratulations. I stopped off at my dressing room first because I thought I’d wait until David and the VIP guests had paid their homage. About five minutes later I went around to Liza’s door. There was no crowd of people outside. Odd. I knocked.
‘Come in, come in!’
I walked in to find Liza Minnelli all alone sitting at her dressing table, still sweating and wiping the make-up from her eyes. She looked up at me like a child who had just performed in its first nativity play.
‘Oh, baby! Did I do OK?’
‘Yes! Yes, it was brilliant. Simply amazing. Really special.’
‘Really?’
She had just surfed the unconditional wave of love in a sold-out Albert Hall and suddenly I was having to prop her up single-handed. For a second I had a glimpse into how difficult it must be to be Liza Minnelli and what a hard job it must be to be part of her life. No one can compete with that audience, and yet that’s the love everything else must be judged by.
I have seen many big divas respond to an audience over the years – Shirley Bassey, Cher, Dolly, Mariah Carey, Diana Ross – and it never ceases to amaze me how the applause almost literally pumps life into them. Beforehand some of them can be difficult or demanding and get a bad press because of it, but these performers are loved unconditionally by so many people that I suppose it’s only surprising that they don’t behave worse.
Dolly, as I’ve already said, is pure joy and I’ve never met anyone with a bad word to say about her. Shirley was a real coup for us to get and it wasn’t that easy. We had booked her a couple of years before but then unfortunately she sat down to watch an episode of the show. Elton John was the guest and because he is so funny and rude the show was even more outrageous than normal. At one point I gave him a sort of dildo space hopper which was made to look like a football with a big cock sticking out of it. Somewhere in London an elderly lady swathed in taffeta looked on aghast. The booking was cancelled. We tried to explain that I wouldn’t be giving Miss Bassey a cock attached to a football but it was too late – the damage had been done. After many notes and flowers she finally said yes. She turned out to be a great guest, and although I had promised to do nothing rude with her, she seemed only too happy to talk about sex. In the end she is a lady of simple needs – good lighting and Cristal champagne and you’ve got a sunny Shirley.
The day after Diana Ross did the show she personally contacted the office to say how much she had enjoyed it. Great! Was it the comedy bits, the audience, the gifts in her dressing room that she had liked? No. The reason she had felt moved to call was because she thought her skin had looked nice. Whatever.
Mariah Carey was a huge booking for us and her publicity team made sure we knew it. If Jesus himself had agreed to do the show I doubt his PR would have made such a fuss. Of course, as is often the case, once you got past all the haunted skinny women with mobile phones for earrings, the star herself was really quite fun, in her own way. There are legions of stories about how demanding Mariah Carey is, including one where she demanded a basket of puppies before a concert. I asked her if it was true. She laughed and said, ‘Of course not. What actually happened was . . .’ and she then went on to tell a story about how she had asked for a basket of puppies before a concert. Quite how she failed to see that both stories were exactly the same remains a mystery to me, as are her odd drinking habits. When she requires a drink she simply cocks her head to one side like a puzzled dog and a small army of people run to her side with all sorts of juices and sodas, each bottle with a straw sticking out of it. So far, so mad, but whereas anyone’s natural reaction would be to take the chosen bottle and drink it, Mariah’s hands don’t leave her side. Like a beautiful celebrity gerbil she just suckles at her drink while a patient assistant holds it. God knows how this started, but you can’t blame a baby for not being able to walk if people carry it everywhere. Somebody needs to tell her. Perhaps she’ll read this book?
Because we are always on the lookout for guests and ways of getting in touch with celebrities, I was intrigued when I got a message from TalkBack to say that Shakira Caine had called. We had never had her husband Michael on the show, so although I knew she probably wanted me to help with some charity thing or other, I quickly returned the call in the hope of endearing myself to the original Alfie. The phone was answered immediately by a woman.
‘May I speak to Shakira Caine, please?’
‘Who?’
‘Shakira Caine?’
‘Oh. Who’s speaking?’
‘Graham Norton.’
‘One moment, please, I’ll see if she’s available.’
A few seconds later a woman’s voice came on the line.
‘Hello, Shakira Caine speaking.’
The voice sounded identical to the first one and it made me laugh to think that someone like the wife of Michael Caine would pretend to be her own assistant. She explained that she wanted to meet me to discuss a project. I asked her what sort of project it might be, but she insisted that we should meet face to face and also that wherever we met there should be a video and television. We arranged that the meeting would take place at my office the next week. I warned everyone that Shakira Caine was going to be paying us a visit and that we should all be on our best behaviour; however, on the day I got a message from the receptionist to say that Mrs Caine had called to say she couldn’t make it after all and could I ring her to rearrange the meeting. I did and she apologised profusely and we rescheduled for the following day at 3 p.m.
The next afternoon the receptionist called me at a little after three o’clock to tell me that Shakira Caine was in reception. I asked Jon if I looked presentable and headed downstairs. In reception there was no sign of Shakira Caine, but a middle-aged lady was sitting on the sofa. When she saw me she stood and held out her hand.
‘I’m so sorry, Shakira couldn’t make it, but I thought it best if I came to talk to you anyway.’
In a way I was almost relieved because I was going to feel like such a phoney sucking up to Shakira just to get to her husband. I showed my mystery visitor into our meeting room and she held out the videotape she wanted me to watch. I stuck it into the machine and a scene from the 1960s movie The VIPs began to play. A young Maggie Smith playing a devoted secretary persuades Richard Burton to write a cheque for a vast sum of money in order to save her boss and the man she loves. As soon as Richard had signed the cheque my new friend instructed me to turn off the tape. I simply presumed it was some new ‘novelty’ way of asking people for money that the ‘ladies who lunch’ had come up with. I turned to the woman sitting on the low sofa. I was still kneeling on the floor in front of the TV. It didn’t seem as if she was going to speak.
‘I’m intrigued,’ I said.
‘Yes, you must be,’ she replied. ‘I’m not Shakira Caine.’
She uttered these words in a strange and deliberate way.
‘Yes,’ I laughed, ‘I know that.’
She shook her head. ‘No, I’ve never been Shakira Caine.’
A horrible misshapen penny began to drop: I realised that I had never spoken to Shakira Caine and was now sitting alone behind a closed door with a woman who I felt fairly certain would fit into most people’s loose definition of the word ‘mad’.
I slowly got up off the floor, not wanting to startle her, and sat on a chair. My mind was racing. True, she seemed like a harmless lady in a pair of grey slacks with sensible shoes, but what if my fake Shakira had a real gun? What i
f God had told her to kill the vile homosexual off the telly? He’d told people to do a lot of things more irrational than that.
‘I’m sorry I lied, but I couldn’t think of any other way of getting to meet you,’ she said.
‘I understand,’ I lied.
‘You seem like a nice person.’
‘I hope I am.’
‘That’s why I thought you might help me. I didn’t know who else to turn to.’
She then went on to tell me a story so awful that it was as heartbreaking as it was hilarious. She had managed to lose all her husband’s money by convincing him to invest in a novelty mattress company. I regret to say I didn’t have the nerve to ask her what exactly a novelty mattress was, but it seems that they can’t have been a great success. The little money he had left she then told him to invest in various shares which then crashed. I did wonder why you would take financial advice again from someone who thought amusing bedding was a good investment, but I let it go. Her plan was that she would use the £5,000 I was going to lend her to play with bank shares. If nothing else, she had certainly embraced that old piece of advice about getting back on the horse. Stocks and shares hadn’t exactly been working for her so far. Now, she told me, her husband was very ill and she was desperate to do something to help.
She took out a small photo album from her handbag. She wanted to show me pictures of her husband. He was old, very old, and slumped in a chair, unable to focus on the camera lens. Someone, presumably my financial whiz-kid, had seen fit to dress him in a novelty Christmas jumper. A knitted Rudolph grinned beneath the old man’s blank grey face. It was awful. Half of me wanted to give her the money, but I knew she would just throw it away on her stupid scheme.
‘Well?’ she asked, staring at me with eyes bigger and browner than the woolly Rudolph’s.
I couldn’t tell her ‘No’ flat out. ‘Let me think about it. I have your number, I’ll call you tomorrow.’
She made me promise, and then slowly, like coaxing someone off a ledge, I walked her to the door and back onto the street.
When I went upstairs I had to tell the story of what had just happened several times, trying to make sense of it. The madness of it all was so random that it was very hard to get a grip on what might be true and what might be part of a complicated scam. In the end I think I believed her, and so the next day I called her with my decision.
‘I’m not going to lend you the money. Your husband seems very ill and I think you should try to enjoy what time he has left and then worry about the money.’
I knew they owned a house: perhaps they could remortgage that? I was trying to give sensible advice to a woman who had pretended to be married to Michael Caine. I found myself lecturing her like a strict parent.
‘Please, never pretend to be Shakira Caine again. I didn’t mind, but some people might and you might get in trouble with the police, and I really think that’s the last thing your husband needs.’
She promised to never do it again, thanked me for calling and hung up.
One of the most depressing aspects of being on television is the avalanche of begging letters that arrive the minute your face appears on the screen. The vast majority of them are genuine and legitimate cries for help from people with no one else to turn to, and yet it is impossible to say yes to them all. I tend to approach them in an emotional rather than logical way, so that some day I’ll write several cheques and another day I’ll say ‘no’. The profound gratitude of the people I help makes the thought of people I say no to all the worse. I sent a cheque a few years ago to a young woman who was trying to pay her tuition fees for drama school, only to find out a couple of weeks later that it was a tabloid newspaper trying to see which celebs were the most generous. I was the only person who had sent money, but it didn’t make me feel generous, I just felt like a fool and now thanks to that clever journalist I am much more suspicious of letters and, to be honest, probably write far fewer cheques.
Whenever I meet a journalist I’m always so glad that college rejected me for the journalism course all those years ago. I’m sure there are happy, pleasant, well-adjusted people who work for the papers, but you rarely meet them. Because I interview people as part of my job, I find being interviewed very uncomfortable. It was a wonderful revelation to me when I was talking to some journalist from the Daily Mail that I wasn’t under oath and I could say what I liked. Knowing that you can lie takes the fear out of any question that they might ask you. There are journalists who, if they read this book, are going to be livid. One Sunday Times journalist had got wind of me trying to become a rent boy, but I calmly assured her that it was all a load of rubbish. I had nothing against the woman – I just didn’t want her to be the one to tell that story.
When I’m doing interviews I don’t exactly grill my guests – I’m no Jeremy Paxman, but then I can’t afford to be. The show is a comedy show and while a rude question might get a laugh, it is going to be quite hard to sustain a happy atmosphere once I’m sitting beside someone with a face like thunder. Also, they are my guest; I have invited them on the show, they haven’t asked to be there – well, apart from George Michael who just phoned my mobile out of the blue and asked if he could do the show on Friday! If only it were always that easy – but my point is, you aren’t rude to guests. You wouldn’t invite a vegetarian around and then force them to eat meat, and so I want my celebrities to leave happy, no matter how hateful, talentless and boring a few of them have been.
The place in the show where things do get nasty is in the monologue. I write very few of the jokes myself and sometimes their cruelty can take even my breath away, but despite this I will usually agree to do them. I know our targets seem random, but I have a fairly strict way of gauging whether or not they are defensible. Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones are rich, successful, in love and have beautiful children. If they can’t take some jokes – no matter how vile – by some guy in a shiny suit on a late-night television show, they really need to go into therapy. Similarly the Royal Family, or most politicians. When things start not to be funny is when the subject starts to seem like a victim. Mel C was funny, but when she seemed to be genuinely unhappy and depressed the jokes stopped. Jordan never seems funny to me because she has a damaged air about her. I know Leslie Ash was very upset about the jokes I did when she had the cosmetic treatment on her lips. I’m sure sitting at home listening to me trash the way you look isn’t the most pleasant experience, but as far as I knew she had started the jokes herself by christening it the ‘trout pout’, and besides, if she was going to complain about anyone, maybe she should focus on her doctor.
I’m ashamed to admit that the monologue joke that got most complaints cannot be defended in any way. It was extremely stupid, thoughtless and insensitive of us. Maurice Gibb had died the day before we were due back on air after our Christmas break in January 2003. Like most offices up and down the land, we amused ourselves by making jokes about his death. It sounds awful, but you probably did it yourself. It’s inevitable that when someone who was famous for singing a song called ‘Staying Alive’ dies, there will be some humour in it. Our mistake was thinking that something that was funny in the office would be appropriate for television. I jumped through my velvet curtains and did a mild joke about the sounds his heart monitor made. ‘Staying alive, oh, oh, oh. Not staying alive, ohhhhhhhhhhhhh.’ It got a laugh, and unbelievably it still didn’t strike us how inappropriate and hurtful it was until the next morning when the complaints started to pile in. I hate to think how any members of his family who were watching must have felt, or indeed his legions of fans. I apologised, and so did Channel 4, who had let us air the joke. There was nothing more to do. I couldn’t take it back. We had been fools.
The next day we were the number-one story on the TV news in Miami, and every British paper carried the story. Unfortunately no one seemed interested in reporting how genuinely sorry we were.
A few weeks later Robin Gibb was bravely promoting his new solo album on This Mor
ning with Fern Britton and Philip Schofield when he just burst into a rant about me. He wanted to rip my head off. Strong stuff, I felt, given that I hadn’t actually killed his brother Maurice, but who knows how any one of us would cope with the stress of promoting an album so soon after the loss of a dear family member. I was a little surprised late in 2003 to see Robin accepting a World Day award in Germany for his contribution to world peace. Didn’t they know he wanted to rip my head off ? On This Morning he promised that he would eventually run into me at some showbiz function. Well, so far, so good. My dread is that I’ll get on a plane and when I arrive at my seat there he’ll be flicking through the in-flight magazine, waiting for the captain to turn off the ‘No head-ripping’ light.
It is hard to explain why, but the members of the public that have been involved with the show hardly ever take offence. I think the reason is that no matter how much we mock them or make them look foolish, they know that there is no malice or condemnation in it. If we let you tell your story on the show or build a comedy item or stunt around something you’ve done, it usually means that we are celebrating your little adventure. I like to think that people who appear on our show aren’t just looking for their fifteen seconds of fame but that they genuinely want to share their favourite anecdote or funniest secrets with the audience. The studio has a real party atmosphere, and it’s easy to get carried away – at least, that’s the only way I can explain a man telling us about how he made a dog come by accident, or another man revealing that he managed to give his mother crabs.
After the show we very rarely hear about any fallout, but I did once bump into the sister of a woman who had told a story on the show, and she told me about its tragic consequences.
I remember meeting her because it was such an extraordinary day. I was supposed to be introducing some acts at a big concert in Trafalgar Square for Nelson Mandela. I was backstage with Richard E. Grant, chatting about nothing in particular, when we noticed a huddled group heading for a Portakabin dressing room.
So Me Page 24