So Me (33 page)

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 those 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.

These were the reasons I gave myself for moving, but maybe I just wanted a fresh start along with everything else in my life, or perhaps I just saw the picture of a house I preferred to the one I had in Bow. In fact, why pretend? That is exactly what happened. I was in the gym one day flicking through the paper as I waited for my trainer (I am aware that at the beginning of this book I would have been excited to find fifty pence down the back of the sofa and now I’m casually dropping in references to personal trainers.
Whether you are reading or living this book the irony is not lost), when I saw a picture of a house by the Thames. On a whim I rang and asked to see it. After the viewing I put in an offer, it was accepted, and it seemed I was on the move in my personal life as well.

I’d reached a point in my life when I didn’t have to worry about the arrival of the gas or phone bill, and as a result I’d stopped reading my horoscope. All I had ever wanted it to tell me was that a windfall was coming my way, and now that it had I was no longer interested. It did strike me, however, that with all the change and new beginnings coming into my life perhaps something was written in the stars. New job, new home, could there be a new boyfriend lurking behind my moon in conjunction with Uranus?

I met Andrew in New York. I was in a club with my friend Jamie, and across the room I saw this man who I reckoned must have been about my age. What really struck me was the way he was dressed. He didn’t look particularly square or fuddy-duddy, but nor was he wearing ripped jeans and a tight shiny top. He had found what I was looking for – an age-appropriate wardrobe. I was just pointing him out to Jamie when he started to walk towards me. As he got closer I realised that beyond the age-appropriate clothing he was any-age gorgeous. He smiled and reached out his hand. It turned out that he was from Scotland and was just visiting New York for the weekend. He fell in with the group of people I was chatting with. One of the women was very drunk, or maybe just naturally annoying, but at one point she opened Andrew’s shirt. Hello! A well-dressed gorgeous man with a great body. My vodka and tonics were kicking in. Soon we were dancing and kissing. I couldn’t believe this
hunk was going to come home with me, and that was just as well because he didn’t. With an ‘I’m too drunk, I’ve got to go’, he was gone, leaving me with a crumpled ball of paper with the number of his hotel. I felt like Prince Charming staring after a strangely muscular Cinderella.

The next day I called. A voice that suggested that seconds before its owner had been asleep answered. It was three in the afternoon.

‘Hello. Is this Andrew?’

A wary ‘Yes’.

‘This is Graham. Graham Norton.’

A long pause and then, ‘How on earth did you know I was staying here?’

He
had
been drunk. I explained and he told me where he would be with his friends that night if I wanted to come by. I said I’d try. When I hung up I had a brief workshop with Jamie who was staying with me. We decided that there was no point in pursuing it. The moment was over.

About two months later I was sitting at my desk. The phone rang.

‘I have an Andrew you met in New York on the line. Do you want to take it?’

‘Yes.’

Now it was my turn to ask how he knew my number. It turned out to be as simple as calling Channel 4 and asking for the name of the production company that made my show. Smart on top of everything else! Apparently he was coming down to London and wondered if I’d like to meet up. We arranged the when-and-wheres, and everything went like clockwork until late that night when we were kissing in a club. He suddenly pulled back.

‘I can’t handle this. I’ve got to go.’ And with that he disappeared.

I stood there feeling foolish and trying to process what had just happened. Maybe I’d got it wrong and he’d just gone to the loo. Minutes passed and people had started to come over to ask me if I was all right. Unless he had a bladder as big as one of Richard Branson’s hot-air balloons, I guessed he wasn’t coming back. I went home alone feeling very stupid.

When we spoke the next day he explained that the pressures of London and my notoriety freaked him out. Would I like to come up to Edinburgh to see him, because he thought he’d cope better on his home turf ? Given how badly this non-relationship was going, I don’t quite know why the word ‘yes’ escaped out of my mouth, but I suppose I was very keen to make something work with someone who was in their thirties and who had a job and a car. Odd that my attempts to be a mature adult made me appear so adolescent. I got on the plane and headed north. Andrew seemed genuinely disappointed and surprised when I told him that I’d booked into a hotel.

‘Given your track record,’ I explained, ‘I think it’s best.’

Sure enough, after a really good night we got back to the hotel, and then, just before we went to bed, he let out his traditional ‘Goodnight’ cry of ‘I’ve got to go’. This time I just laughed. I’d found a bolter.

Unbelievably, we did try one more time with him coming to stay with me in London. I tried not to get my hopes up, but somehow I could feel my stomach flipping. Yet again my cock and heart had conspired to make a fool of me. I knew that Andrew was deeply damaged goods and was as
likely to become my boyfriend as Russell Crowe, and yet I was so desperate to make him like me that I was practically handing him the clown make-up and asking him to apply it to my face.

The London weekend was a disaster. We stayed up all night and then he headed off to some chill-out party and I never saw him again. I did get a long apologetic email from him in which he explained why he felt he had to break up with me. Break up with me? If what had gone on between us constituted a relationship then I am officially dating my postman. About six months later I walked into a bar in Cape Town and there he was. He bounded up to me, all tan and teeth.

‘Great to see you. I’d love to do lunch – I’ll call you tomorrow.’

Despite everything that had happened, the next day I found myself waiting for the phone to ring. He never called.

‘Table for one, please. Booked under the name of Fool.’

I packed my heart away and explained to my cock that from now on it was flying solo.

Channel 4 had come up with a plan which managed to cheer me up. At the start of 2004, instead of doing one last season of five nights a week, why not take the show to New York and do a new weekly show from there? Of course I wanted to, but now that they had inadvertently forced my hand, I had to tell them about the BBC before they committed to spending a large fortune on what was to be my swansong on the station.

Kevin Lygo, having gone off to Channel Five for a while, was now back at the helm of 4. I went in to meet him,
feeling nervous and wretched. Kevin’s office always has six things in it: a table, a pencil, a notepad, two chairs and him. On previous occasions the effect had been very calming in a Zenlike way, but now it just meant I had nowhere to look, nothing to distract me. I explained as best as I could why I felt the time was right for me to leave, and why I thought BBC 1 was the place for me to go. We talked around it for a while, but eventually Kevin could see that my mind was made up. I brought up the subject of New York.

‘I’ll completely understand if you no longer want to do it.’

In the sort of gesture that would be unthinkable on American television or indeed most British TV, he waved his hand and said, ‘No, it’s in the schedule already, off you go.’

We shook hands and he walked me to the lifts. Why can’t all break-ups be that civilised?

The shows trundled along until suddenly we were doing our last ever week of
V Graham Norton
. We would probably have been much more sentimental about it all except that for the end of this series Channel 4 had sent us to Los Angeles. Although the shows went well and we had some Hollywood royalty like Tony Curtis, Debbie Reynolds, Sharon Stone and Burt Reynolds as guests, we kept comparing it with the week we had spent in New York and it just didn’t measure up. The audiences in New York for both stand-up and the TV show were the best I’d ever encountered. They don’t come to judge, they come to have a good time, and if you give them a good time they are unstinting in their appreciation. Don’t get me wrong, dear reader – I love British audiences too, but I think we are so familiar with each other now that often doing a show in the UK is just like performing for a group of friends. I find myself
being lazy and the audiences indulge me. In America I have to up my game. It’s like starting all over again and that’s exciting.

After LA we all went our separate ways to spend Christmas with family and friends. I sat in the sun with my mother and Paula and a couple of friends. I very rarely discuss my work with my family, but the Saturday before we came away the
Daily Mail
had risen to the bait of the belated BBC announcement of my arrival. The headline read ‘Sultan of Sleaze or Comic Genius?’ I wonder if you can guess which they decided I was? Short of telling people to go out and burn their TV licences in the street, I don’t think they could have been any plainer in their disapproval.

We talked about it, and for the first time ever I got the sense that my mother understood what I did for a living. She seemed fully confident that I could turn my Channel 4 persona into something suitable for BBC 1. Of course this may just have been wishful thinking on her part so that she could look her friends in the eye once more. One of my mother’s best friends always feels the need, every time I see her, to tell me, ‘I like Graham Walker, but I don’t like Graham Norton.’ Each time I patiently explain that she isn’t meant to. Unfortunately rural widows in their seventies aren’t my target audience. Happily I know that there are plenty of such women who do like the show because they stop me in the street to tell me.

There is a real dilemma in my home town about me. They are delighted that someone from Bandon is on the television; they just wish it didn’t have to be me. Even my school has never once asked me back to do a single thing, not give a speech, cut a ribbon, turn a sod – nothing. Sadly, should
the invitation come now, it’s too late. I’ll save them the expense of stamps by stating simply here: fuck off.