‘There’s Nelson,’ declared Richard. ‘Follow me!’
I trotted behind him towards the little cabin that contained the world’s favourite leader. A word with the large South African lady with the clipboard outside and suddenly we were escorted in. Richard approached Nelson first and began telling him how he had in fact gone to school with his son. I felt slightly awkward and looked at the other man standing beside Nelson. He smiled. I’d seen those teeth before – it was our own lovely leader, Tony Blair!
‘Hello!’ I said.
‘Hello,’ he replied. When Tony writes his memoirs I doubt he will find the room for a description of our meeting.
By then Richard had moved away. I stepped forward. The lady with the clipboard introduced me.
‘This is Graham Norton. He is a television presenter. He is very bad.’
I hoped this was simply linguistic confusion on her part rather than an actual attack on my character. Nelson looked slightly taken aback: why was he being introduced to a bad person?
‘What about “cheeky”?’ I asked.
The lady considered this for a moment, but then decided on ‘naughty’. I could live with that. I shook the great man’s hand and told him what an honour it was to meet him. He nodded his head and then thanked me for helping to end apartheid. While this was very nice of him, I did think that he was going to be in this room for quite some time if he was personally going to thank everyone who had signed that petition outside South Africa House while they were waiting for a night bus.
It was just after this, as I was stepping out of the Portakabin, that a lady approached me and said: ‘You wrecked our family!’ The clipboard lady had been right, I was bad.
‘How?’ I asked, although I was dreading the answer.
She told me that her sister had told a story about her father finding her dildo in her bed. I remembered her because she had seemed very sweet and had told the story very well. Somehow the girl had imagined that neither her parents nor their friends watched my show. It turned out that the programme was more popular than she thought: her parents were so upset that they didn’t speak to her for months. Finally the sister who was telling me all of this managed to broker a truce: the whole family were going to meet up and have a nice meal and forget that it had ever happened. A lovely ending to a sad story. If only it could have ended there. The night before they were all going to kiss and make-up, Channel 4 showed a compilation programme featuring highlights from the last series of So. Can you guess what one of the highlights was? The wound was reopened and the meal was cancelled.
Hearing this story did make me feel awful, but we do our best to make sure that this sort of situation doesn’t arise. We ask everyone to sign a release form after the show, when they are no longer in the heat of the moment, and even if people call us after they have signed the form and ask us to cut things out, we always oblige.
Hopefully despite the controversy and not because of it, V Graham Norton was continuing to do well. Perhaps as some sort of reward, Channel 4 came up with a plan. For the last week of the series at the end of March we would take the show to New York. By a weird coincidence, at the same time the American TV giant NBC approached us about doing a pilot of a US version of the show. It was decided that we would tape the British shows from the Sunday until the Thursday and then on the Friday we would make a slightly different hour-long version of the show for the American network. The Friday was going to be 4 April, my fortieth birthday.
Dealing with American television executives is a bit like taking a shower in jelly: sickly sweet, slimy, and leaves you feeling dirtier. To begin with, our dealings with NBC were sunshine and light. They loved the show and didn’t want to change a thing about it. This seemed odd given that I had recently met a producer of The Tonight Show, NBC’s late-night comedy chat show, and he had told me that they still weren’t allowed to say the word ‘fart’, never mind the sorts of things I say and show on my programme. NBC assured us that things were changing all the time and it would only mean minor adjustments. Mmm.
The incident that really summed up the frustration of trying to please an American network happened when we were trying to book a guest for their pilot. They sent us a list of suggested guests. One of the names on that list was Debbie Harry from Blondie. We had a good relationship with Debbie, and I thought it would be great to have a guest who was familiar with the programme when we were trying to make the show for an American audience. We booked her. Almost in passing we mentioned to NBC that we had gone ahead and confirmed one of their suggested guests. Outrage! We had no right to make the booking without getting their approval first. After that call, Graham, Jon and I just looked at each other and shook our heads. Much as we wanted to work in America, McDonald’s was beginning to look like a better option than this mindless wrangling.
It sounds a ridiculous thing to say and it’s an even harder thing to explain, but doing that week of shows in New York was the happiest of my life. Being in New York and witnessing the positive reaction of the audiences and guests to our silly show was thrilling. These people got it and we got them. All the staff we had brought over from Britain just mucked in and helped on every show. We went out each night but still found the energy to do the show the next day – we were all surviving on pure adrenalin. I think it was because it had all gone so well that I suddenly felt that I couldn’t bear to do the pilot for NBC on the Friday. I knew it was going to be torture and that if it ever did see the light of day it would be such a misrepresentation of what was good about our show that people would hate it. On the Thursday, high on success, I announced that we weren’t going to do the NBC show the next day or ever.
Melanie and Graham proceeded to have one of the most hideous meetings imaginable where they had to explain to a series of more and more senior NBC executives that there wasn’t going to be a pilot the next day. We agreed to pay all the costs that had been incurred and simply walk away. If Graham and Melanie had stripped off and had full sex in front of them they couldn’t have been more surprised. For me it was simply the biggest, most expensive birthday present I could ever have given myself.
On the Friday night we had our wrap party in the private room of a trendy restaurant in the Chelsea area of New York. Champagne flowed and toasts were made. We had just done five great shows in the most exciting city on earth. I had just stuck two fingers up to America’s number-one network, a limo was waiting to take me back to the interior-designed town house I had bought in the heart of Manhattan, and yet the only fact to truly shock me that night was that somehow I had become forty years old.
17
A Dish Served Old
A PIGEON FLYING INTO A glass door couldn’t have been more shocked than I was when I hit forty. I just didn’t see it coming. Obviously I saw the date in the diary: I was thirty-nine and soon I was going to be forty. What I didn’t expect was that I would find it so hard to deal with. The week of my birthday in New York, GQ magazine named me the worst-dressed man in Britain, and while that is without question true and a great honour, it really didn’t give me much confidence when I was trying to figure out what I should be wearing as a forty-year-old man. The jeans and T-shirts that had been my off-screen uniform for years suddenly seemed pathetic. ‘Age appropriate’ became a phrase I found myself using over and over again. I had never particularly wanted to get older, but now that I was I found I didn’t know how to.
After the end of the series in New York, I headed off to Cape Town for a holiday. The moment the plane touched down I seemed to go into party overdrive. If I ran around fast enough, maybe no one would notice just how old I had become. I was hanging out with guys in their twenties, and while I could just about keep up, every now and again something would happen to remind me that even if I felt the same as I always had, things had changed. On the dance floor someone leaned over.
‘I’ve got to hand it to you, you’ve got stamina!’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Well, you know, for
a bloke your age.’
Thank you and goodnight.
Another evening I ended up snogging some guy who must have been in his mid-twenties. He came back to the house and we sat having a drink. Everything was going fine until he suddenly unleashed that question which even Siegfried fears more than tigers.
‘By the way, how old are you?’
I opened my eyes as wide as my facial saddlebags allowed and replied in what I hoped was a calm voice, ‘Forty.’
It was as if I had poured salt on a slug – he couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. If I hadn’t opened the door he would have dislocated every bone in his body in order to slither under it, and of course the worst bit was that I couldn’t blame him.
Happily there are some guys who prefer older men, but that raises a whole series of other problems. Going to bed with them when you are pissed and horny is fine, but in the morning when they spring from beneath the duvet and prance around like an ad for some new product called Pert, I lie there feeling like a gay Michael Winner, and nobody, not even Michael Winner, wants to feel like that.
Towards the end of my holiday I found myself yet again with a group of twentysomethings all heading back to an after-hours party in a house that one of them was housesitting. We piled into cars and drove up the steep, winding roads into an area of Cape Town called Fresnaye. The house was stunning, with picture-perfect views of Cape Town stretched below us like a vast carpet woven from strings of fairy lights. We raided the cellar and sat around the pool drinking expensive bottles of red wine. Soon we were splashing around in our underpants, and although it might have looked like the opening scene of a porn movie there was one thing wrong with the picture: one of the people cavorting around was forty years old, and it was me!
Suddenly the guy who was house-sitting this piece of paradise grabbed my hand.
‘Follow me!’
Dripping, I was dragged along through the garden and into the house.
‘I want to show you something!’ He was so excited that I assumed it must be either some amazing piece of electrical wizardry or his cock.
We finally arrived in a small room at the back of the building and we stood there panting and glistening from the pool. The boy reached behind the sofa and brought out his treasure – it was a gun. He handed it to me, cold and heavy. I stared at it. I had never held a gun before. I let it lie on my open palms like a dead bird and asked, ‘Is this loaded?’
‘Yes.’
I carefully handed it back to him, thinking that if this were a movie one of us would not be leaving this house alive. As it happens we all did, but the incident with the gun was the wake-up call I needed. Growing old may not be the best thing in the world, but it does come with some perks. One of them is being wise enough to know when to stop. It was time to stop.
Just as I was giving myself a red flag in my personal life, professionally a major green one was waving. Given that my job involves me being a big kid night after night, it is sometimes hard to remember that the production company I had started with Graham and Jon had become quite a big business. Following the debacle with NBC we had taken on representation in America with UTA. We still wanted to try working in the States, and this time we were going to attempt to get it right. Our agents organised a week of meetings in LA and Graham, Jon, Melanie and I flew out to see who would like to buy our little show.
As it turned out, quite a few people did. Each morning we piled into a minibus and were driven through the oddly familiar streets of LA to glass-walled offices where smartly dressed men and women explained why their station was the place to be. The very first meeting we had was with the people from ABC, and it took place in one of the executive dining rooms at Disney. We sat looking through a window framed by the giant armpit of one of the seven dwarves that keeps the roof aloft. As I lifted my wine glass, I noticed the silhouette of a famous mouse etched into the glass. It seemed unlikely that this was the home for a show that had featured the pipes of Pam and the ping-pong-firing exploits of Helga.
In America, television really is an industry, and it makes the way we operate in Britain seem slightly like amateur dramatics in comparison. Each evening we would gather by the pool for a drink to discuss what had happened during the day. We met lots of people we liked and a fair number we loathed, but what we hadn’t met was anyone we thought we could have fun working with. On the last day of our trip we had one final meeting. It was with a cable channel called Comedy Central which produced shows like South Park and was for many years the American home of Absolutely Fabulous. We walked into a room like all the others we had been in – glass walls and a long table with designer water on it – but the difference was that this room had people in it we instantly clicked with. After we left, UTA had lots of discussions with various people about different offers, but back in London there was no doubt in our minds: Comedy Central was our natural home.
Change was also afoot in the UK. I had just done a year of five nights a week and we were getting ready to do another year of it. Much as I still loved the show, I had to admit that I was tired. On top of that, the whole ‘forty years old’ thing had also had an impact. I didn’t want to spend what was left of my ‘active’ years doing nothing but work. I wanted to spend more time with my friends, I wanted to read, travel, get drunk. I wanted my life back. The trouble with ending five nights was what to do next. No matter how we looked at it, staying at Channel 4 didn’t seem like an option. Anything we could think of seemed like taking a step back. The only step forward we could see was to try something completely new on a different network. Jon and I had often talked about doing a prime-time family-friendly show, and this seemed like the perfect time to try it.
Three years after walking away from the BBC I found myself at lunch with the new people in charge. Lorraine Heggessy runs BBC 1 and Jane Lush is head of entertainment.
I’d met Lorraine at various times and I’d always liked her. When she talks about television you can tell that she’s not just an executive but also a fan. She’ll mention what her kids enjoy, or which programmes her husband watches. It is a rare executive indeed who has the theme tune from EastEnders as her mobile phone ringtone, but that’s Lorraine. Jane I didn’t know so well, but we had sat next to each other at the Beckhams’ World Cup party, so again I knew her in out-of-work mode. We met in San Lorenzo in Knightsbridge and the meal was fun. We talked about holidays, restaurants and what had been on telly the night before and then somewhere around coffee they said they’d still like me to join the BBC and I said that I’d like to. It was as simple as that.
2004 hung in the air before us like a glittery lantern. A series on Comedy Central followed by a new show for the BBC. We couldn’t wait. The only slight problem was that we would have to. We had nearly a year left of the Channel 4 show. I think we were all a bit worried that it would be difficult to maintain our enthusiasm for the programme now that we had decided to end it, but in fact the opposite happened. Because there was light at the end of the tunnel we found ourselves enjoying the shows even more.
We had done what everyone had said was impossible: we had produced a successful five-nights-a-week comedy chat show in Britain. I’m enormously proud of that achievement, but also slightly sorry that I didn’t keep it going for longer. I’m sure there are people who think it ended because we had run out of ideas or guests, but the truth of the matter is, if you can keep a show like that running for two years you could keep it going for twenty. The weak spoke in the wheel was me. I watch David Letterman in America, where he has been doing his show for thirty years, and while I envy him his talent and success, I don’t envy him his life. I think getting a job like that five nights a week needs to be your first big break.
The trouble with me was that I was already getting paid very well and living a very pampered life on the back of one show a week, so when I went to five nights a week, although I loved the work and the challenge, I didn’t have that thing that I would have had if they’d just handed me Jack’s job all tho
se years before – gratitude. Being thankful will keep you showing up at work for many years. Like a greyhound who had been fed too many rabbits, I’d lost my hunger for the race.
Channel 4 quickly got the message that we would be doing V Graham Norton to the end of our contract but no longer. What they didn’t know was that I would be leaving the Channel. The BBC were desperate to announce the fact that they had signed me up, presumably to get the backlash from the right-wing press out of the way as quickly as possible, but I wanted to tell Channel 4 personally. However, just like trying to tell a lover it was over, I couldn’t ever find the right time.
As if there wasn’t enough change and upheaval in my life, I decided to do a very odd thing. I bought a new house in London. I don’t really understand why. My house in Bow was finally exactly the way I wanted it, but because I had been stupid and poorly advised I realised that it wasn’t going to stay like that for long. The new bathroom which had taken nearly a year to finish – for legal reasons I can’t name the company who did it, but Jesus I’d like to! – was full of a beautiful wood. It was elm that had been given an oiled finish. My toilet had been set into it, the bath was surrounded by it, even the sink was fixed into a big slab of it. It looked gorgeous. However, just as the carpenter who had installed it all was going out the door on her last day, she turned and, almost as an afterthought, said, ‘Oh, do be careful not to get any water on that wood because it stains. Bye!’ I rang the estate agents.
The other reason for moving was that the local children had found out where I lived. Some Sundays I would just sit for hours under the window so I couldn’t be seen while children shouted through my letterbox. Even as I was doing it I asked myself, ‘Why am I behaving as if I’m under siege? Why not just answer the door?’ In all honesty I don’t know, but there was something about the way the front door opened straight into the open-plan living room that meant the kids would have effectively been in my house, and somehow that seemed like an unacceptable invasion of my privacy. I have never invited journalists into my house, and I feel that gives me the right to keep my door closed on the world. Perhaps that is very naïve of me, but I feel as if I give both the public and the press enough access to me without them hanging around outside where I live. When I am door-stepped by a journalist, I always wonder why they feel the need to come all the way out to Bow in London’s East End when they could just as well have stood outside my office, where they know I arrive and leave at exactly the same time every day.
So Me Page 25