Chat-show king Norton bags €3.4m pay day
Total earnings for presenter come to €4.1m
CHAT-show king Graham Norton last year received pay of more than €3.4m for presenting his popular Friday night BBC show.
The charismatic BBC presenter is in a league of his own as the £2.97m (€3.4m) represents pay of £92,894 per show, or £1,857 per minute from the 31 ‘Graham Norton Shows’ and one ‘Graham Norton’s Good Guest Guide’ broadcast during 2018.
ITV-owned production firm So Television Ltd produces the ‘Graham Norton Show’ and the pay by So Television to Norton is in addition to the £610,000 that the BBC pays the entertainer each year for presenting his BBC Radio 2 show and for a range of programmes and series that don’t include his chat show.
The combined pay from the BBC and So Television to Norton totals £3.582m (€4.1m) for the year.
In an interview earlier this month, Norton referred to the attention around his pay when he said: “All the people who say, ‘He earns that, he doesn’t deserve that’, they’re absolutely right. You cannot justify my wages, so I don’t try. Am I still cashing the cheques? Yes, because somehow the market forces have decreed this is my value.”
The €4.1m pay to Norton dwarfs the pay of the much-publicised top 10 earners at RTÉ where the highest earner, ‘Late Late Show’ presenter Ryan Tubridy, was on an annual salary of €495,000 for his TV and radio work at RTÉ in 2016.
The ‘Graham Norton Show’ drives revenues at So Television and last year the firm recorded revenues of £15.89m, broken down between revenues of £11.6m in the UK and £4.25m for around the world, chiefly through selling the ‘Graham Norton Show’ globally. Last year, So Television recorded pre-tax profits of £2.34m.
Norton (56) has shown over the past number of years that his talents extend well beyond entertaining millions of TV viewers every week with the publication of two novels, his debut ‘Holding’ in 2016 and ‘A Keeper’ at the start of last October. Last year, ‘A Keeper’ was one of the country’s best-selling books here according to Neilsen Bookscan, selling 28,866 copies.
Norton’s show is a ‘must do’ for Hollywood ‘A-listers’ and singers promoting movies and albums in the UK and Europe, and last night’s show underlines that, featuring screen legend Robert De Niro, Bruce Springsteen and Sienna Miller.