GRAHAM NORTON MILLIONAIRE MULTITASKER
The Irish charmer earned £2.6m last year thanks to a portfolio career comprising a chat show, a radio slot and Eurovision. Oh, and he’s also a novelist and agony uncle
IT IS 13 years since Graham Norton was named as the eighth most influential person in British culture. Today he must be a contender for the top slot. His flamboyant personality and quick-witted comedy style have dominated the BBC over the past decade – assets that brought him an income of £2.6million last year it was revealed yesterday.
Now believed to be the BBC’s highest earner, Norton is richer than many of the celebrity guests who appear on his weekly chat show. Virtually all of them are put at ease by his camp persona and effervescent charm, a blend that enables him to make risqué jokes on primetime television while remaining a firm favourite of middle-class viewers.
The flagship of the Norton brand, his TV chat show on BBC One, pulls in 4 million viewers. He also has his own show on Radio Two, and has become the BBC’s go-to presenter for big events including the Baftas and Eurovision. On Saturday he was once again the best reason to watch a singing contest that would be unbearable were it not for his running commentary of mocking one-liners.
And like the late Sir Terry Wogan whose Eurovision shoes he first filled nine years ago, Norton is an easy-on-the-ear Irishman. However he did experience a religious upbringing that may have left an emotional legacy.
A man who now appears so comfortable around people was friendless when he was growing up as a Protestant in a country where Catholics made up almost 90 per cent of the population.
He first noticed the religious divide when his father, a travelling sales rep for the Guinness Brewery, moved the family to Bandon in County Cork. “I remember we moved during the summer holidays – and it was amazing. I played with all these kids and was invited to parties,” Norton revealed in 2012.
“Come September there was much excitement about going to school and it was revealed I wasn’t going to their school. I never saw them again. We all recognised we were different.”
The expectation was that he would meet “a nice Protestant girl” and have “Protestant” babies. But Norton, of course, was marching to the beat of a different drum. “I remember not wanting to be gay and hoping it was a phase and hanging on to the bisexual tag for a long time,” he revealed.
He says it was only when he THE MIDAS TOUCH: Graham on his BBC chat show with Diane Keaton, Michael Fassbender, Jessica Chastain and Kevin Bacon. And one of his own wines – profits go to a dog charity spent time in a hippy commune in San Francisco when he was 20 that he discovered the “wonder” of meeting people who had “other ways of looking at the world”.
He moved back to London to study drama and in 1992, launched himself as a stand-up at the Edinburgh festival – in a tea-towel. His comedy drag homage to Mother Teresa made the news after Scottish Television’s religious affairs department mistakenly thought he represented the real Mother Teresa.
Since then Norton, who is the winner of eight Baftas, has risen inexorably to become a national treasure with secondary careers as a novelist – his first thriller Holding is published in paperback on Thursday – and even as an agony uncle both in print and on his radio show. In 2012 he sold his production company So Television to ITV for £17million.
BUT despite all this professional success finding lasting love has proved to be a challenge. It is telling that when the wine-loving Norton was invited to concoct his own blend of sauvignon blanc by New Zealand producer Marlborough in 2015, he chose the charity Dogs Trust as the recipient of his proceeds. Dogs are his life. The first chapter of his second memoir, The Lives And Loves Of A He-Devil, which was published in 2014, was devoted to them. “The emotional bond with my fur babies is profound and, as crazy at it seems, fully reciprocated,” he wrote. In 2013 his labradoodle Bailey and a terrier named Madge, adopted from Dogs Trust, were cited as a factor in a relationship break-up when his devoted but hapless former partner of two years, Trevor Patterson, a fashion consultant 20 years his junior, claimed Norton treated his dogs like the children he never had. Apparently he even chartered a private jet to fly his dogs to New York with him because he couldn’t bear to leave them behind. “There were four of us in the partnership,” he said, adding: “Frankly he’d do anything for those animals. They mean the world to him and were always his first love. In some ways he put them before me.” He added that the effervescent star would often fall asleep on the dog bed in his kitchen. On another occasion he even jumped into the Thames after Madge fell in the river. For a man who has made a career out of bringing other people out of their shells, it appears that dogs help him feel at peace in his own. As he wrote in his memoir: “When I see puppies I understand those women who become addicted to having babies.”