Graham Norton:
Graham Norton opens up to Bryony Gordon about love, loneliness and why we should take a break from the BBC
Graham Norton is just so
nice, isn’t he? So twinkly, so perky, a real feather boa of a man. But gosh, get the 52-year-old talking about the BBC and he turns into a terrier. “I think they should switch off the BBC for two months,” he says, when the conversation (inevitably) turns to the subject of his employer. “Just put £24 into everyone’s bank account, and switch the BBC off for two months, and people would s--- themselves.” Has he suggested this to Lord Hall? “Of course I have! In a letter. I’m not sure if I should tell you this, but the BBC did do a thing… they wanted to know what the public appetite was for the licence fee, so they did a deprivations test. They got a mixture of people – those who were happy paying the licence fee, those who didn’t want to pay it, those who thought it was too high. And they took their services away for two weeks. Just two weeks. No internet, no radio, no TV. And at the end of it, everyone was happy to pay for the licence fee.”
Norton, who is rumoured to take home £1.5 million a year, is aware that anything he says about the corporation will be met with a lot of eye rolling, as happened this week when it was revealed he was one of the signatories of a letter to David Cameron calling for the Government to protect the institution from cuts. “It’s hard for me, because I should be able to be very vocal in my defence of the BBC, and kind of say ‘Let’s treasure this thing. Let’s not have it dismantled.’
“But of course, everyone goes, ‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ But having spent time in other countries, I see that the BBC is amazing. That it is incredible. It’s just that my voice has no weight in that debate.”
But shouldn’t he feel able to cherish and criticise the organisation? “Yes, of course, but now is not a time to criticise. Right now is… it’s a really perilous time for the BBC. The trouble is that every government hates the BBC. The BBC will criticise the government, and so there is that slight ‘If you’re not with us, you must be against it.’”
As popular as Beeb-bashing is, Norton
‘My new rule is I don’t drink alone. If home by myself, I don’t have that bottle of wine’
believes it is fundamentally dangerous. “The BBC is one of those things people will not understand until it’s gone. And then they’ll be going ‘Oh, telly’s a bit s---. This is a weird period drama – there’s only two people in it and no cars’.” He laughs his barking seal laugh. “I do read comments under pieces about Chris Evans doing Top Gear or me doing whatever, and they often say, ‘I’m going to stop paying my licence fee, blah blah blah.’ And I think, all right, but you do know that Top Gear subsidises the BBC to this enormous extent? Just think about the things that you do like. Like Radio 4, or CBeebies.”
We have come to Shoreditch House to discuss the paperback publication of his latest book, The Life and Loves of
a He Devil. He is bearded but neat; sparkly, but spiky when he needs to be – just as he comes across on the telly. His book is one long love letter to all of the things he adores – Ireland, New York, dogs, divas, alcohol. It is a sort-of-memoir; he did an actual memoir 10 years ago, that detailed his father dying, and the time he almost died after being mugged and stabbed, and says he didn’t want to fob off the reader with another detailing all the things he has done in the past decade.
It’s a very jolly book, I say. “Yes. In fact, I had to put a chapter in at the end about the things I love to hate [loud sneezing; grapefruit; beach holidays], because the book made me appear too nice, I felt.”
Does he think people see him as too nice? “Not if they meet me.” The barking seal, again. “I suppose I’m surprised I’ve become as positive and gung-ho in life as I am.” Why? Does he suffer from depression? “I think that word gets bandied around by some people. It’s a debilitating thing, it’s awful. You’re just a bit blue, so shut up! So no, I don’t suffer from depression but I have been down about things.”
He had a lovely upbringing in Bandon in Cork, and goes back there regularly, but the first 30 years of his life, before he found success as a comedian on Loose Ends, and then in
Father Ted, “did seem like quite hard work,” he says. Though he’s had some crazy times with alcohol, he wouldn’t say he was an alcoholic – and he never got into drugs – though he concedes that “52 years of booze stories back to back does look… when I finished that chapter I did think, ‘Jesus, this is not a good look.’”
How often does he drink now? “My new rule is I don’t drink alone. Now, if I’m home by myself, I don’t have that bottle of wine or that bottle and a half of wine that I used to have.”
Loneliness is the one theme that seems to run through the book. In the first chapter, he writes of his pets that: “Maybe it is sad that no human has yet managed it, but these two dogs have tapped reservoirs of love in me that I didn’t know I had. I may be single, but there is no doubt in my mind that I have significant others.” Actually, he’s not single any more. He has been seeing Andrew Smith, a record company executive, for “seven or eight months”, but he won’t be drawn on the subject. “He will not be doing an interview on the other side of town where he can give his side of our relationship. I know it’s annoying, but I would prefer to annoy you than him.” The seal barks again.
Despite his ebullience, it’s clear he is naturally an independent person. “I really like my own company, I have to work hard at not isolating myself. When I do things it’s normally because people have instigated it.” Perhaps this is why he enjoys giving advice to lonely souls (his Telegraph column, he says, is his “dream job”). Still, I tell him I imagined that he’d be hanging out with any number of the other A-listers who regularly sit on his chat show sofa. “Yeah, I thought that too. But I don’t hang out with [them] at all. That’s the odd thing about being a chat-show host: because your name is in the title, you’re high status. But, in reality, you play low status, because you’ve got to imagine these people are fascinating and that a half-baked anecdote is funny. You really do have to be a kiss-ass groveller.”
We talk about how long he plans to do the show. “It’s a difficult one. What am I? 52? So if I retired at 55, say? But then I think, if I live until I’m 85, that’s 30 years. I need to think about this carefully, because once you get off the bus, you’re not getting back on it. I mean, there are things you can do, like a day time quiz or something. They’re quite lucrative. Maybe I’ll do that.”
Does he fancy retiring to Ireland now that they have passed the gay marriage laws? He goes back there a lot, and “whenever I leave, I always want to stay. So I don’t know.” He is writing a novel, a whodunnit with a sprinkling of romance in it, which is due to be published next autumn. “Maybe if the novels took off then that would be a good place to put your head down and do that.” And, marriage? “To a lot of older gay people, they’d made sense of not being able to get married. But now that we can it just seems lovely. Love outweighs the politics. And you never say never to those kinds of things.”