SHARP IN SO MANY WAYS
Graham Norton, stand-up comic and TV show host, has turned crime writer. Rosie Fiore spoke to him about his debut novel
Famous Irish funny man Graham Norton tells us why his first novel is a crime thriller
ALIFETIME ago, I was trying to make it as a stand-up comedian in Joburg, working the wonderful Punchline Pub in the foyer of the then Civic Theatre. One weekday night, we were told that the headliner was a comedian visiting from the UK. He was camp and Irish, wearing a fabulous shirt with a hot six-pack bod printed on it.
He was, quite simply, the funniest stand-up I’ve ever seen live. I thought I would expire, I laughed so much. His name was Graham Norton, and he was, in 1996, largely an unknown. A year later, he starred in Father Ted, was shortlisted for the Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Festival, and his unstoppable rise began.
Legendary chat-show host, radio presenter, agony uncle, memoirist, host of the Eurovision Song Contest — he does it all, and, unusually for a celebrity in the UK, seems to do no wrong. The British public is notorious for tearing down their darlings, and yet Norton is adored and his star continues to ascend. And now, he’s taken one of the ultimate celebrity risks and had a go at writing a novel. This is what has brought me to an elegant London hotel to meet him.
He sweeps in, perfectly on time, to meet six international journalists. We’re all seated around a boardroom table and he’s ushered to a seat at the head.
“Oh!” he says, as he sits down. “I’m so sorry, someone else’s coffee is here.”
“That’s for you, Graham,” says the publicist.
“Thank you so much!” he says, delighted at this thoughtfulness, and I’m reminded that there’s nothing like a catering situation to expose a person’s character. What’s revealed here is that Norton is a nice, unassuming man, with lovely manners. His mum, of whom he speaks often and with great affection, would be proud.
“I’ve finally written a book she can read!” he says happily. “She and my sister were among the first readers.” He explains that he’d asked his mum not to read his two previous autobiographical works. “They’d be a bit of a shock to her,” he explains. “But she reads a lot of fiction, especially crime fiction, so I knew if she liked this, it was all right.” And she did.
You read that right. Crime fiction. It’ll come as a surprise to many that glitzy Graham Norton, whose chat-show sofa features the A-est of A-listers, has written a cosy crime novel set in a tiny Irish village. There’s no breathless celebrity gossip between these pages, and very few jokes indeed.
The protagonist of Holding is Sergeant PJ Collins, the obese village guard (Irish policeman), whose day-to-day police work comprises managing the traffic for the village fair. That is, until building work in a field uncovers the skeletal remains of a young man.
Holding is inhabited by a motley crew of characters — the aforementioned PJ, his timid housekeeper Mrs Meany, the remote and lovely Evelyn Ross, who keeps house for her two spinster sisters, and unhappy Brid Riordan, who seeks solace from her unhappy marriage at the bottom of a wine glass.
All of them are isolated, in their own way, all stuck in a holding pattern, trapped by the secrets of their past, until the discovery of the bones on the old Burke farm shakes some metaphorical skeletons loose. It’s a wellconstructed, quiet and beautifully observed book.
I ask Norton why he chose to write under his own name. “I already had a deal with my publishers,” he explains. “After the memoir, I wanted to write a novel.”
Clearly, Hodder & Stoughton wanted the Norton name on the cover, and indeed, the book is riding high in the charts and garnering very good reviews.
“I’d have loved to write under a pseudonym,” he says. “I was aware what writing under my name means for the reader; I’m looming over your shoulder. So I tried to distance myself. If I wasn’t Graham Norton off the telly, I probably would have written something more urbane and funny. But it turns out I’ve loved writing this book — being back in Ireland and getting to know these characters.”
One of the other journalists points out that there is no gay character in the book. “That was a deliberate choice,” Norton says. “I felt that was something that would pull the reader out of the story and they’d say, ‘Ah, there’s that Graham Norton, shoving himself into the book.’ In the next one, there will be though.”
Norton chats happily about books and his Daily Telegraph agony aunt column. “When they asked me to do it nine years ago, I nearly bit their hand off to say yes. It started out lightly, answering etiquette questions, but I take it very seriously now. I really worry about the people who write in. Some of them are facing desperate things.”
We manage to draw him on Robbie Williams’s appearance on his TV show the week before, in which Williams told a rather scurrilous story. “Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake were so shocked!” he gossips. “They’d come to promote a kids’ film!”
When I remind him of our first encounter at the Punchline Pub all those years ago, he recalls the evening vividly. “I came back to the UK and told all the comedians I knew to go to South Africa,” he says. “I told them, South African audiences are WILD!” Perhaps it’s time to invite him back?
‘I told them, South African audiences are WILD!’