Glad to be Graham...
EDNA O’Brien writes in The Light of Evening: ‘On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation.’ Graham Norton has his characters suffer more than humiliation, and indeed tears, in his debut novel Holding. In an outlying small Irish country town, there’s a murder mystery, with a body being found in the ground — revealing with it Duneen’s darkest secrets. Intrepid and somewhat tubby Sergeant PJ Collins is determined to get to the bottom of all it.
There are two women humiliated over a man (maybe the man uncovered in the bog.) He rejects one woman (Evelyn Ross, who now lives in a ‘big house that had forgotten every happy memory it had once contained’) to get engaged to the other (Brid Riordan). Evelyn reads about the wedding in the paper. Brid’s wedding never happens. Duneen is an unhappy place riven with bad blood and memories to match, with God’s controlling celestial shadow hanging over the town almost as much as PJ’s considerable belly hangs over his too-snug An Garda Siochana trousers . . .
Looking almost sylphlike wearing a blue polka-dot shirt with jeans and runners, the exalted Corkonian rocks up into Shoreditch House, a chic members-only club in East London, last Monday at 2pm for our lunch appointment. The urbane chat-show potentate of long-standing and crowned head of celebrity interviews on the box is his usual winning self.
Everyone in Shoreditch House suddenly seems to be looking above their delicately tossed salads in his direction, looking at our Graham for a goo. I find it remarkable that for someone so famous in England, and further afield, that he is “currently single — thanks for asking”.
I ask Graham Norton would he see himself getting married or adopting one day.
“Adopting a husband!” he laughs. “‘I’ve adopted my husband.’ Never say never. It is becoming, as the years go by, less likely.”
Why is that? In all the times I have interviewed Graham Norton down through the years — going back to 2004 when his autobiography So Me was released — the grey-bearded star always comes across as somehow implacably pragmatic, normal.
“Isn’t that a reason not to get married? So, I think you need to get carried away if you get married.”
Are the phone-lines burning up from County Cork with his mother Rhoda — whom Graham is taking to a posh country house in Ireland to celebrate her upcoming birthday — asking him, more in hope than expectation: ‘Have you met a nice man yet’?
“No, they’re not. She knows who she’d like me to go out with. She’s met him. He’s a friend of mine. She adores him.” And does Graham? “I mean, I like him. He’s my friend. But no — we’re not dating. But in my mother’s world, he’s the one.” Graham adopts his mother’s voice: ‘Why can’t you find someone like him?’”
And why can’t he? “I’m not particularly interested in finding someone like him.”
Has Graham ever been in a relationship where he and his partner, to paraphrase the book, ‘lie down like a wounded animal — dying’? Was that the break-up with his Australian ex, Ashley, of many moons ago?
“No — that [relationship with Ashley] was like a trip to the vet!” he laughs. In Holding, Graham writes of Rosemary and Robert’s marriage and, in particular, ‘when full wet kisses became chaste lips barely touching ... two people lying in the dark’.
Is that when Graham gets out of a relationship? “I don’t feel like I have ever been in a relationship like that, because I think my relationships have ended. I think the thing about marriages — particularly in Ireland — they go and they morph into something so terrible, lying in the dark together.”
Was that Graham’s parents’ marriage? (Graham’s father Billy died in 2000.) “I hope not. What’s that phrase about marriages are a covered dish? I really hope it wasn’t. And I don’t think it was. But, equally, we all know those couples where you kind of think, ‘Jesus!’ I always think if you are in a relationship and it is going through a bad phase, I often come to the conclusion that actually what we had was a good phase and this is what this relationship is now.”
But is that not just turbulence, I say to him. When a plane hits turbulence you don’t get a parachute and jump out?
“No, you don’t. Turbulence? I think it is more like the plane is in free-fall, and it is not going to right itself. You can imagine that the pilot is going to do something but actually the pilot is dead and the drinks trolley is never coming back again.”
Was he always so negative about romantic relationships? “I don’t mean to be. I am negative because you are asking me to be negative. Equally I know lots of people who are in love and happy.”
Graham told the Telegraph in a 2013 interview (though he says now that he can’t recall saying it) that Bruce Forsyth once told him that “he couldn’t bear to go home with the ‘onstage him’.” Graham says he sees himself as “just a guy who works on telly”. He laughs that he is considerably less upbeat at home than he is on the television. He also laughs that it would be “nuts” if he was the upbeat ‘onstage’ version of himself while at home in Wapping.
Has anyone ever gone to bed with the onstage version of campy TV superstar Graham Norton and woken up with him, the laconic, philosophical Irish man who loves Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall? “They might have thought they’d gone to bed with the onstage Graham Norton and then, you know, after a few hours of complete boredom and no celebrity surprises — ‘Your house is devoid of celebrities!’” he laughs.
Is it Graham’s deepest fear that potential suitors might be going out with him for the wrong reasons?
“It is not my fear. It is their fear. If I think that’s what they think they’re doing, then I will quickly disabuse
Over lunch in London, Graham Norton tells Barry
Egan about his home life, his love-hate relationship with Ireland, and how he might get married one day — despite his attitude to romantic relationships being, “the plane is in free-fall, and the pilot is dead and the drinks trolley is never coming back again!”
them of that,” he says, “And I think, after half an hour, an hour, you realise: ‘Oh, hang on. This is very like a house. His life seems quite like a life.’ So I don’t think it takes long for people to figure that out.”
Is he possibly finished with romance? Will he have his dogs, Madge and Bailey, around the house instead? “They are dogs! That does kind of bug me when people say these are my doggy boyfriends or my fur children. No — f**k off! They’re dogs! They s**t on the street!” he laughs.
“I do love them, but I love them as dogs! They are not proxy anything. They are actual dogs in the role of dogs.”
The home he shares in Wapping with Madge and Bailey has an intriguing — considering the owner’s wealth and apparent sophistication — lack of sophistication, as Graham describes it. “The overall effect of the house is of rich student. It never looks quite the way I imagined it.” When he is not at home or on the box, Graham cycles around London
‘Mum knows who she’d like me to go out. She’s met him. He’s a friend of mine. She adores him. I like him. He’s my friend, but we’re not dating. But in my mother’s world, he’s the one.’
to keep fit. He was running “but my 53-year-old knees weren’t liking that. So now I’m on my bike.” Graham doesn’t have people pointing at him as happens around the City of London, primarily because he has a “kind of World War II pit helmet on”. His relatively slim frame is in stark contrast to Sergeant Sumo, as he is referred to in the book, aka PJ Collins.
Is the character his inner Graham? Is he, or has he ever been, PJ Collins?
“I could imagine being fat pretty easily. I think I have a fat mind and probably a fat person’s relationship with food. But also I think it’s that idea of being an outsider. In a way, that’s what that means. It is anything that separates you. Being a guard separates you a lot already, which is why, I think, PJ finds it quite easy to be a guard. I think guards in small communities have a very tricky job: that line of being friends with everyone and then: ‘I’m afraid I am going to have to arrest you because you are drunk as a skunk and driving.’”
Has Graham ever been arrested? “Oddly,” he laughs. “I never have.” Asked did he hear stories growing up about happenings about the place in County Cork from his parents, Graham says that his mother Rhoda — whom the book is dedicated to — told him the story that was to inform
Holding while they out for a walk one day. It was a story not untypical of Ireland — of a woman “who had been a farmer’s housekeeper, but more was going on. They were much older. They weren’t the kids that were in the book. More was going on. The understanding was, he would marry her, and then out of the blue — I may have made this up, but I seem to remember that they read the engagement [to another woman] in the paper; he was going off to marry someone with land on the other side of the valley.
“And she went in and cleaned the house for the last time, then locked the door and went home to her sister’s and was never seen again, and that the house was just left like that.
“So, that was kind of the story that I had going in: to write a bitter-sweet [story] of thwarted romance in Ireland,” he says, (adding — because I asked him — that he grew up reading Edna O’Brien and he “loves Edna O’Brien”.)
Erroneously, Graham believed that he didn’t have the “skills to write a book about that.” That’s when he thought if he put a crime element, a mystery element, into the book, then it would give it “a framework, a hook”.
“That is a much easier book for me to write as my first book and also it is also much easier for a reader. You kind of know: the bones are found at the beginning in the first chapter, so you kind of think whatever else happens I am going to find out who owns the bones.”
Unfulfilled and unhappy Evelyn, he says, “might have been me had I stayed in Ireland. I could have turned into that.”
Is he channelling some inner part of his psyche with this book?