These were the reasons I gave myself for moving, but maybe I just wanted a fresh start along with everything else in my life, or perhaps I just saw the picture of a house I preferred to the one I had in Bow. In fact, why pretend? That is exactly what happened. I was in the gym one day flicking through the paper as I waited for my trainer (I am aware that at the beginning of this book I would have been excited to find fifty pence down the back of the sofa and now I’m casually dropping in references to personal trainers. Whether you are reading or living this book the irony is not lost), when I saw a picture of a house by the Thames. On a whim I rang and asked to see it. After the viewing I put in an offer, it was accepted, and it seemed I was on the move in my personal life as well.
I’d reached a point in my life when I didn’t have to worry about the arrival of the gas or phone bill, and as a result I’d stopped reading my horoscope. All I had ever wanted it to tell me was that a windfall was coming my way, and now that it had I was no longer interested. It did strike me, however, that with all the change and new beginnings coming into my life perhaps something was written in the stars. New job, new home, could there be a new boyfriend lurking behind my moon in conjunction with Uranus?
I met Andrew in New York. I was in a club with my friend Jamie, and across the room I saw this man who I reckoned must have been about my age. What really struck me was the way he was dressed. He didn’t look particularly square or fuddy-duddy, but nor was he wearing ripped jeans and a tight shiny top. He had found what I was looking for – an age-appropriate wardrobe. I was just pointing him out to Jamie when he started to walk towards me. As he got closer I realised that beyond the age-appropriate clothing he was any-age gorgeous. He smiled and reached out his hand. It turned out that he was from Scotland and was just visiting New York for the weekend. He fell in with the group of people I was chatting with. One of the women was very drunk, or maybe just naturally annoying, but at one point she opened Andrew’s shirt. Hello! A well-dressed gorgeous man with a great body. My vodka and tonics were kicking in. Soon we were dancing and kissing. I couldn’t believe this hunk was going to come home with me, and that was just as well because he didn’t. With an ‘I’m too drunk, I’ve got to go’, he was gone, leaving me with a crumpled ball of paper with the number of his hotel. I felt like Prince Charming staring after a strangely muscular Cinderella.
The next day I called. A voice that suggested that seconds before its owner had been asleep answered. It was three in the afternoon.
‘Hello. Is this Andrew?’
A wary ‘Yes’.
‘This is Graham. Graham Norton.’
A long pause and then, ‘How on earth did you know I was staying here?’
He had been drunk. I explained and he told me where he would be with his friends that night if I wanted to come by. I said I’d try. When I hung up I had a brief workshop with Jamie who was staying with me. We decided that there was no point in pursuing it. The moment was over.
About two months later I was sitting at my desk. The phone rang.
‘I have an Andrew you met in New York on the line. Do you want to take it?’
‘Yes.’
Now it was my turn to ask how he knew my number. It turned out to be as simple as calling Channel 4 and asking for the name of the production company that made my show. Smart on top of everything else! Apparently he was coming down to London and wondered if I’d like to meet up. We arranged the when-and-wheres, and everything went like clockwork until late that night when we were kissing in a club. He suddenly pulled back.
‘I can’t handle this. I’ve got to go.’ And with that he disappeared.
I stood there feeling foolish and trying to process what had just happened. Maybe I’d got it wrong and he’d just gone to the loo. Minutes passed and people had started to come over to ask me if I was all right. Unless he had a bladder as big as one of Richard Branson’s hot-air balloons, I guessed he wasn’t coming back. I went home alone feeling very stupid.
When we spoke the next day he explained that the pressures of London and my notoriety freaked him out. Would I like to come up to Edinburgh to see him, because he thought he’d cope better on his home turf ? Given how badly this non-relationship was going, I don’t quite know why the word ‘yes’ escaped out of my mouth, but I suppose I was very keen to make something work with someone who was in their thirties and who had a job and a car. Odd that my attempts to be a mature adult made me appear so adolescent. I got on the plane and headed north. Andrew seemed genuinely disappointed and surprised when I told him that I’d booked into a hotel.
‘Given your track record,’ I explained, ‘I think it’s best.’
Sure enough, after a really good night we got back to the hotel, and then, just before we went to bed, he let out his traditional ‘Goodnight’ cry of ‘I’ve got to go’. This time I just laughed. I’d found a bolter.
Unbelievably, we did try one more time with him coming to stay with me in London. I tried not to get my hopes up, but somehow I could feel my stomach flipping. Yet again my cock and heart had conspired to make a fool of me. I knew that Andrew was deeply damaged goods and was as likely to become my boyfriend as Russell Crowe, and yet I was so desperate to make him like me that I was practically handing him the clown make-up and asking him to apply it to my face.
The London weekend was a disaster. We stayed up all night and then he headed off to some chill-out party and I never saw him again. I did get a long apologetic email from him in which he explained why he felt he had to break up with me. Break up with me? If what had gone on between us constituted a relationship then I am officially dating my postman. About six months later I walked into a bar in Cape Town and there he was. He bounded up to me, all tan and teeth.
‘Great to see you. I’d love to do lunch – I’ll call you tomorrow.’
Despite everything that had happened, the next day I found myself waiting for the phone to ring. He never called.
‘Table for one, please. Booked under the name of Fool.’
I packed my heart away and explained to my cock that from now on it was flying solo.
Channel 4 had come up with a plan which managed to cheer me up. At the start of 2004, instead of doing one last season of five nights a week, why not take the show to New York and do a new weekly show from there? Of course I wanted to, but now that they had inadvertently forced my hand, I had to tell them about the BBC before they committed to spending a large fortune on what was to be my swansong on the station.
Kevin Lygo, having gone off to Channel Five for a while, was now back at the helm of 4. I went in to meet him, feeling nervous and wretched. Kevin’s office always has six things in it: a table, a pencil, a notepad, two chairs and him. On previous occasions the effect had been very calming in a Zenlike way, but now it just meant I had nowhere to look, nothing to distract me. I explained as best as I could why I felt the time was right for me to leave, and why I thought BBC 1 was the place for me to go. We talked around it for a while, but eventually Kevin could see that my mind was made up. I brought up the subject of New York.
‘I’ll completely understand if you no longer want to do it.’
In the sort of gesture that would be unthinkable on American television or indeed most British TV, he waved his hand and said, ‘No, it’s in the schedule already, off you go.’
We shook hands and he walked me to the lifts. Why can’t all break-ups be that civilised?
The shows trundled along until suddenly we were doing our last ever week of V Graham Norton. We would probably have been much more sentimental about it all except that for the end of this series Channel 4 had sent us to Los Angeles. Although the shows went well and we had some Hollywood royalty like Tony Curtis, Debbie Reynolds, Sharon Stone and Burt Reynolds as guests, we kept comparing it with the week we had spent in New York and it just didn’t measure up. The audiences in New York for both stand-up and the TV show were the best I’d ever encountered. They don’t come to judge, they come to have a good time,
and if you give them a good time they are unstinting in their appreciation. Don’t get me wrong, dear reader – I love British audiences too, but I think we are so familiar with each other now that often doing a show in the UK is just like performing for a group of friends. I find myself being lazy and the audiences indulge me. In America I have to up my game. It’s like starting all over again and that’s exciting.
After LA we all went our separate ways to spend Christmas with family and friends. I sat in the sun with my mother and Paula and a couple of friends. I very rarely discuss my work with my family, but the Saturday before we came away the Daily Mail had risen to the bait of the belated BBC announcement of my arrival. The headline read ‘Sultan of Sleaze or Comic Genius?’ I wonder if you can guess which they decided I was? Short of telling people to go out and burn their TV licences in the street, I don’t think they could have been any plainer in their disapproval.
We talked about it, and for the first time ever I got the sense that my mother understood what I did for a living. She seemed fully confident that I could turn my Channel 4 persona into something suitable for BBC 1. Of course this may just have been wishful thinking on her part so that she could look her friends in the eye once more. One of my mother’s best friends always feels the need, every time I see her, to tell me, ‘I like Graham Walker, but I don’t like Graham Norton.’ Each time I patiently explain that she isn’t meant to. Unfortunately rural widows in their seventies aren’t my target audience. Happily I know that there are plenty of such women who do like the show because they stop me in the street to tell me.
There is a real dilemma in my home town about me. They are delighted that someone from Bandon is on the television; they just wish it didn’t have to be me. Even my school has never once asked me back to do a single thing, not give a speech, cut a ribbon, turn a sod – nothing. Sadly, should the invitation come now, it’s too late. I’ll save them the expense of stamps by stating simply here: fuck off.
Before the start of our last ever Channel 4 series we had a big party in London to thank all the people who had worked on So and V Graham Norton. The venue was near London Bridge under some railway arches, and slowly the big, dank space filled up with hundreds of people. I looked at the sea of faces and was overwhelmed by how many people it had taken to keep the show on the air over the years. Obviously I knew all the researchers and producers, but the people I really appreciated seeing at the party were the guys who opened the curtain for me night after night, the cameramen who were never afraid to let me know at rehearsal whether a joke was funny or not, all the people who didn’t need to care about the show but did. I was going to miss them.
A new set, title sequence and music: we packed our bags and headed off to the States to film the final series. To say that New York was cold is like saying that Hitler was naughty. I’ve never experienced anything like it. We had all been warned about the city’s winter, but somehow our little British coats didn’t seem to work. About a week after we had arrived I was doing a photo shoot for Hello! magazine in order to promote the show. I stood on the roof of the Maritime Hotel in Chelsea. Snow lay all around and the wind was blowing off the Hudson river. I had never felt so cold in my entire life. I started remembering a documentary I’d heard on Radio 4 about hypothermia and how just before it killed you you began to feel warm. I was starting to feel warm. I knew that I was going to die one day, but I really didn’t want it to be during a Hello! photo shoot. I was beginning to regret my decision not to invite them into my lovely home. The photograph ended up on the cover and I looked like a freeze-dried pig with an eye infection.
I wasn’t the only one feeling the cold and the desire to be in my lovely home. One Sunday afternoon I went to put something in the bin in the kitchen. A sudden movement and there, running across the room to explore the gap behind the washing machine, was a small mouse. If an alligator had crawled out of my toilet I couldn’t have been more frightened or horrified. Given that I have survived both rats and cockroaches, I don’t know why it affected me so badly, but gasping and flapping my hands like a penguin chick I ran out of the room. I heard a little scuttling sound and, turning around, saw that the fucking mouse was following me. My ensuing scream seemed to convey fairly effectively to the mouse that he was not welcome. He headed for the bookshelves. I leant against the wall, frozen with fear like a teenage girl in a slasher movie. I looked around, suddenly blind to the pristine minimalism of my beautiful house; I might as well have been living in the local council dump. My first thought was that my mother was coming to stay and there was no way she was going to tolerate a room-mate with a tail and a penchant for cheese. I headed off to the corner shop and returned with a couple of traditional mousetraps. I baited them and put one by the bin and the other one where I had last seen my tiny trespasser.
A week passed and there was no sign of the mouse, alive or dead. The next weekend I was having everyone from work over for drinks and I felt that having mousetraps lying around didn’t exactly scream glamour. I decided that the mouse must have gone out the same way it had come in and threw the traps away. The day after the party I was coming down the stairs and there, standing by the bottom step, was the mouse. It looked at me with a mixture of apology and embarrassment and sheepishly headed off to hide under a chair by the window. This time my fear was replaced by rage. ‘Right, fucker! You are going to die!’ I yelled out loud as I stormed out the front door. I returned with a series of new mousetraps, but these ones seemed much more lethal. They were glue-boards. Rather naïvely I assumed that the glue on the boards also contained some sort of poison or lethal fumes, but, as I was to discover, what they are called is exactly what they are. Boards with glue on them.
A couple of days later I came into the kitchen and there, stuck to the board, was the mouse. Apart from having a large bit of cardboard stuck to it, the little creature seemed very much alive. I considered my options. I had to kill it, but how? I guessed that you were supposed to hit it on the head with a hammer or something, but there was no way I could do that. Perhaps I should just feed it occasionally until it died of old age? It gave a great shrug and I realised that I had better act quickly or it might get away. I can’t believe that animal rights protesters spend their Saturdays throwing paint on women in fur coats when they could be picketing every corner shop that sells glue-boards.
Horror upon horror, I found myself filling a bucket. I was going to drown the mouse. Using a pair of kitchen tongs I lifted up the board and threw it in the bucket. It was then that I made an interesting discovery – glue-boards float. I now had a mouse on a tiny surfboard floating aimlessly around the bucket. Although the rodent seemed more than happy to ride the waves for the time being, I needed the horror to end. I grabbed the tongs and plunged board and surfer beneath the surface. I was letting out little involuntary yelps and could hardly bear to look, but when I did the mouse was still alive, staring up at me from the depths of the bucket. I began to doubt myself. Were mice amphibians? After what seemed an eternity the answer finally came back as ‘no’. The whole thing was wildly traumatic. I felt like Lucille Ball starring in The Silence of the Lambs. What made things even worse was that I had seen not only the first Stuart Little movie but also the sequel. I sat on the kitchen floor having just endured The Passion of Stuart Little as directed by Mel Gibson.
Apart from my cold-blooded murderer tendencies and the terrible weather, the other main shock in New York was going back to doing one show a week. I still went into the office most days, but usually all I did was check my emails and compare hangovers with everyone else. Not only had my workload decreased but I was also suddenly without my biggest excuse for not drinking – my car. My resolve to behave like a grown-up after turning forty hadn’t lasted very long. On top of that, the old cliché that the city never sleeps turns out to be true. Every bar stays open until 4 a.m. and I felt it was my duty to be in all of them all the time. Every time I spoke to my mother she would say, ‘You looked a bit tired on the show this week.’ It be
came a slight concern to me which would come to an end first, the series or me.
I found myself increasingly leaving Jon and the team to get on with the day-to-day planning of the shows. I sometimes stumbled into meetings about the show, but mostly I was just told on the day what was planned and what I needed to do. At first I felt very guilty, but then I’m afraid to admit that I began to enjoy it. It felt good that after all these years of working together, Jon and I were so in sync that I could trust him completely to come up with ideas that I liked and would feel comfortable doing. Although Channel 4 was paying for these shows and we were making them for a British audience, we couldn’t help but see them as ten pilots for our Comedy Central series. Yet again it was hard to feel sentimental about the end of our six-year run at Channel 4 because we were so excited about our new ventures. We went to meetings at Comedy Central where people showed us what the billboards advertising our show would look like, and yes, there would be one on Sunset Boulevard!
In Britain I have been very careful to make sure that any press I do is only about the show. I don’t go to many premieres or showbiz parties, and I tend not to eat in the restaurants that have the paparazzi hanging around outside. Trying to launch a new show in the massive market that is America is a very different ball game. There are so many new shows, so many performers, so many channels that to have any chance of succeeding, you have to do a bit of jumping up and down and waving. For the first time in my life I employed a publicist to help me promote the forthcoming Comedy Central show. I’m still not very clear about what they do, but I knew that I was supposed to have one. People were asking me who my lawyer was, should they speak to my manager as well as my agent? It seemed that starting to work in the States was like learning a new language.
So Me Page 26
