‘I knew I would have stabbed someone in the face with a fork if I had worked in restaurants much longer’

“The book came out of my head. If you want to psychoanalyse me with this book, knock yourself out. It is interesting — and I wasn’t aware of it while I was writing — but when I was writing it, I was like: ‘Look at me looking at other people in relationships.’ Then I was thinking: ‘And they’re all awful, terrible relationships.’”

Big Tom in Holding, we’re told, drank the farm and gambled his money away. Did Graham growing up in —Cork know farmers like him?

“Weren’t there always those women that everyone just pitied because they had married a f **king fool? The drunk husband and you know, ‘Oh, he made a real show of her’?”

Graham notes that when publishers sent out Holding to get feedback in advance, lots of people referred to the character Brid O’Riordan as an alcoholic. He laughs at this. “I didn’t write an alcoholic. I just wrote someone who self-medicated a bit!” Does he self-medicate? “We all self-medicate! We are self-medicating now!” Graham says raising his coffee cup.

In Holding, the character Martin decides that if there was a God, then God ‘was an awful b ***** ks’.

Does Graham feel God is an awful b ***** ks or is just something Martin said? “I must say that would come straight from me. Straight from me. But, yes, if there is a God, he is...wow — good plan! It is as basic as...’

Children with cancer? Auschwitz? Rwanda? “Everything. It’s the Calais Jungle. It’s all the s**t you see on the news. So,” he says, “someone is in charge? Someone is running this?’ Because you wouldn’t want to claim responsibility for that. Because if there was a God, you’d just want to go; ‘There is no God!’ You’d bow out.”

Those who have faith would say that God doesn’t give us anything we can’t carry.

“I totally respect other people’s right to believe that, if that gives comfort. If you genuinely think that will get you through the darkest of times, it is a good thing for them. I can’t choose to believe that. My way of getting through any dark times is to know that there are brighter times. Because that is just the way s**t works.”

What were the dark times for him? “Before I had any success,” says Norton who is now worth trillions and has won awards to match (seven Baftas for Best Entertainment Performance, and Best Entertainment Programme), “I had eight years of working in [London] restaurants. I was living in a council estate — probably a house block you can see from here,” he says vaguely pointing from the vantage point of the sixth floor restaurant we’re in.

“I had zero money. Literally counting pennies. It was hard to believe at times. I had boxed myself into a corner where I was working in a restaurant and the restaurant was less and less successful. And then it closed. It was good that it closed because it forced me to go, ‘Okay, if I get a job in another restaurant, it is like I’m saying this is my career.’ By that stage, I knew I would have stabbed someone in the face with a fork if I had worked in restaurants much longer. I had to get out. It galvanised me to do bits of writing and help out friends with no plan.”

Evelyn talks in the book about having ‘banished that youthful version of herself completely.’ Has Graham?

“I think ‘banished’ is kind of a negative thing. I don’t know who I was going to become. I suppose when I was younger I thought I was going to wear corduroy trousers, work in an office and have children, because everyone did. That was the most you could aspire to. That was to belong. That was succeeding.” Graham left Ireland in 1983/84 to seek his fortune, and to truly belong. He says he didn’t hate the Ireland he left behind. “Hate is a strong word.” Graham told me in 2014: “I was never in love with Ireland.”)

“I certainly never felt I would go back,” he adds, “because it didn’t feel like a place that I fitted in. It didn’t feel like a place that I would flourish. It is interesting now, because now I really love going back, and I am always sad when I leave, but I wonder if I was 18 now back at UCC would I still want to leave. It seems to me that the curtains have been drawn and the windows thrown open. Ireland physically seems brighter. Maybe it is only because I only spend the summers there.”

“I think the nicest thing about Ireland is how the young people revel in their modernity and their tolerance. I think they wear it as a badge of pride that they would not be homophobic. It will be interesting to see as generations grow and that kind of darker past that we had — that Ireland that we all grew up in where it was all about what you couldn’t do...” Graham adds that because he “knew from a very early age I was leaving, I never really engaged” with the politics of the country in which he was born (April 4, 1963).

Is that because he grew up in a country effectively homophobic by law and where homosexuality wasn’t decriminalised until 1993?

“Not consciously, no; in reality, yes. I mean, the idea of being an actor, which is what I nominally wanted to be — if you came to England you could go to drama school. There weren’t drama schools in Ireland.”

Does he find it slightly annoying, even trite, to be referred to as, variously, a national treasure and a gay icon?

“It is nicer than being called a blight on Britain. They are nice things for people to say, but they are sort of meaningless. Actually meaningless.”

Has he interviewed anyone on The Graham Norton Show who he felt was a bit of a homophobe?

“I don’t think I have, no, because if you sense that someone doesn’t like you, I think it is a bit facile to kind of go: ‘It’s because I’m gay!’ They’re lots of reasons not to like me,” he jokes, laughing, adding that his friend Maria “sent me a card once for my birthday that read: ‘It’s not homophobia. Everyone hates you.’”

As if. Holding, by Graham Norton, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced €13.99