Graham Norton: ‘Angry people want you to lose rights. I hope young gay people are up for the fight’

Graham Norton has a story about a time when his mother was very ill in hospital in London some years back. Norton was distraught, but there was a television show he was due to present that evening, a BBC talent programme, and he decided to go through with it. Backstage, one of the guests, the comedian Barry Humphries, took Norton by the shoulders and said: “You are very lucky: you have been given a task.”
“And he was right,” Norton says. When he returned to the intensive care unit of the hospital, his mother was feeling better and so was Graham Norton. “It meant that I wasn’t sitting in a car park, sobbing. It’s like the people who cut the sandwiches at funerals. It’s much easier to be busy.”
Whether in moments of crisis or calm, Norton likes to stay occupied: it soothes him and perhaps even defines him. At 61, an age when many are contemplating their pension entitlements, the presenter and novelist’s stride has barely slowed: although he has finished his Virgin Radio show, he has a novel due in shops next week, his fifth since his gentle and deftly penned crime debut, Holding, was published to acclaim in 2016. There’s also his promotional wine-quaffing on behalf of his successful drinks brand and the not-so-small matter of his BBC TV chatshow, back on screens next month.
A resident of Wapping in London, Norton often summers with his husband, Scottish film-maker Jonathan McLeod, at his second home in Ahakista in west Cork, where he’s known for hosting the annual village quiz and taking part in the West Cork Literary Festival in the nearby town of Bantry.
Despite his celebrity, Norton is a low-key presence, who even makes the process of writing his bestselling novels seem like a happy accident, just another arrow in his quiver. “He’d have a black hoodie on, you wouldn’t even notice him in the shop,” says one local of Norton’s presence in west Cork. Today in Bantry, it’s easier than ever to miss the presenter: although it’s late July, the day has taken an autumnal turn, a fine mizzle obscuring the brightly painted blues and pinks of the shops on Main Street. “Jaysus, the weather is shite, isn’t it? You can’t even see the day,” calls one resident across to the receptionist at the Maritime Hotel overlooking Bantry Bay, where we’re due to meet.
Bang on time, Norton comes through the revolving doors of the hotel with the hood raised of his bright blue windcheater, wearing a pair of denims and box-fresh white trainers, a beautiful watch glinting on his wrist, and his wedding band around his ring finger. He’s tanned and weather-beaten, eyes crinkling around the edges, looking younger than his years, and so instantly friendly that you could almost forget his fame. Sipping coffee in the library area upstairs, Norton is conscious of the irony of his position: having left Bandon in west Cork, where he was raised, as a teenager, because he wanted to feel free to do his own thing, without the curtain-swishing and eyes of a small town trained on him, he then succeeded in becoming known on a global scale, turning the world into a kind of Bandon.
“I hated being seen and everyone knowing your business. Even Cork became kind of small. And then I did this weird thing of, I turned the world into a small place. Walking down Oxford Street, I’m seen. It’s such an odd, counterintuitive thing that I did. But it means that coming back here is lovely. Because at least here it makes sense. I would recognise a lot of people here. It’s much more disconcerting when you don’t know the other people and you have no hope of knowing the other people. A girl in a youth group asked me what it was like being famous – and it is like living in Bantry.”
For Norton, who was born in Dublin under the name Graham Walker, leaving Ireland was a necessary part of the process of becoming himself. In his memoir So Me, he describes his early experiences coming to grips with his sexuality, realising he wanted to live abroad, and feeling the truth of the words that, to quote his old schoolteacher Niall MacMonagle, you should “never do anything just for your parents; after they’re dead you are still going to have to live your life”.
Here Norton adds that, “Growing up in west Cork as a Protestant, you felt quite other. In Bandon, there was probably a bigger Protestant presence than in other towns, but you still felt like you were in a Roman Catholic town in a Roman Catholic country. People used to sign letters to Gay Byrne on the radio, from a ‘good Irish Catholic’. It always felt like those three words had to go together. You couldn’t be a good Irish without the Catholic bit.”
In London, Norton tried to make it first as an actor, finding some success, including on stage and as Father Noel Furlong in Father Ted, before belatedly realising the dream wasn’t quite what he had thought it would be. His big break came with Channel 4’s So Graham Norton, a show made for a raucous, well-lubricated, post-pub audience, perfectly suiting Norton’s cheeky, slightly smutty, quick-witted hosting.
When the offer came to move to the BBC in the 2000s, some were unsure if it would work: Sue Lawley of Desert Island Discs asked: “Is his mischief to become more respectable?” It did work and then some. First airing on BBC Two, The Graham Norton Show made the leap to Friday nights on BBC One in 2009, raising Norton’s profile to household name status in Ireland and the UK.
“The show is what everything is based on,” Norton says. “The books, the radio, the wine, anything else I do is because of that show. Dale Winton had a thing: ‘Don’t quit the hit’: that was his mantra. I don’t want to quit the hit. When I go back in September, I sit in the chair in rehearsal, in the big, empty studio, and there’s something so familiar about it, that is lovely, but there’s also something unknown about it, which is why I still enjoy it. Will this be a good show? A bad one? I don’t know.”
As the years have passed, his sofa has become ever starrier – guests have included Tom Cruise, Madonna and Rihanna – but the lively, whipsmart production ethos has prevailed, allowing comedy stalwarts such as Miriam Margolyes to gleefully wreak havoc on the conversation. “She’s funny and astute – she produces herself far more than you think,” says Norton. “There’s a twinkle in her eye. She knows when to drop in her story. She’s a smart operator.” So too is Norton, who can take even the most anodyne of comments from one of his celebrity guests and turn it into comedy gold. There’s a sense of him as the circus grandmaster, bringing levity but also great control to proceedings, not easy when you have A-list guests expecting attention, although Norton, characteristically, brushes the compliment off. The shows are pre-recorded, giving him some licence, and also sympathy for presenters who have no such safety nets, such as on The Late Late Show.
“I think Patrick Kielty is doing a really good job,” Norton says, of the show’s current presenter. “He seems like a really good fit for it. It’s interesting to have a comic at the helm of that show, because it’s never been a comic before and typically these shows are hosted by comics or people with a comic sensibility. Live is very hard because there’s less room to play.”
Norton has been a guest on the show, as he was with the previous incumbent, Ryan Tubridy. Their paths have crossed in recent months, albeit largely via entrance and exit doors. Norton retired from Virgin Radio in February after concluding his three-year contract, while Tubridy began work at the station in January, having had the most dramatic and startling of departures from RTÉ, after it was announced that his salary had been under-declared by the broadcaster, propelling him into the eye of a media storm.
Some months back, the pair were pictured on Instagram having lunch. Did Norton give Tubridy any wise counsel over his steak frites and salad? “I really didn’t, because I’ve never been through something like that. I’ve been on the margins of controversy, I’ve been a bit of a story sometimes, but I’ve never been that. I can’t imagine a media storm becoming a national obsession the way it did here. So I would have no advice because I genuinely don’t know how hard that must have been. It must have been hell. So: good luck to him sitting in Virgin towers. I think he did the right thing. It must feel so lovely to be out from under that sort of scrutiny. It must have been just terrible. He got the job, that’s the hard bit. He’s a brilliant broadcaster so I’m sure he’ll do well.”
For Norton, the act of leaving Virgin Radio, having previously worked weekends for 10 years on BBC’s Radio 2, came as a huge relief. “It has transformed my summer, not having to drive to and from Bandon every Saturday and Sunday. In the summer I’d do [the show] from C103 on the quays in Bandon.” It has also afforded him more personal time with his husband.
The week we meet, it’s just after the second anniversary of the celebration of their nuptials in front of 120 guests at Bantry House, just down the road from where we’re sitting. How is Jonathan? “He’s grand, all good,” Norton smiles, a note of reticence and warmth creeping into his voice.
Happy? “I believe we’re happy, you’d have to ask him. But as far as I’m concerned, we’re happy.” We talk a little about wedding rings and the hazards of keeping them safe. Norton keeps his ring on all the time. “I swim with it on. Sometimes, it’s so cold, you think, my finger will shrink and it will fall off, but so far so good.” Marriage might have come late to Norton’s door, but as he points out, “legally for a lot of years I couldn’t. I was unable to get married for many years. So that’s my excuse.”
The timing of Norton’s departure from Virgin is important in other ways: there is a sense that Norton the broadcaster is slowly giving way to Norton the novelist. Norton began his novel-writing career using the “scaffolding” of crime fiction to safely hang a story on. “Sometimes plotting a book can be like putting a duvet cover on: you’re like, ‘where’s the corner?’” he laughs. But in his fifth novel Frankie, Norton operates a more freewheeling narrative, telling the story of young Frankie Howe, who leaves postwar Ireland to try her luck in 1960s New York, where she winds up running a hip restaurant, full of charismatic youths and outré individuals. Norton is more sure of himself these days as a novelist, he says, and you can tell: it’s there in his deft evocation of place, skipping between New York, London and west Cork, and in his delicate questioning of moral and philosophical standpoints: particularly strong in the novel is his evocation of the outbreak of Aids in New York in the 1980s.
In the book, there’s a flash of pain when an older gay waiter mentions to Frankie all he couldn’t do as a closeted youth – and wonders aloud if the younger generation really understand the rights that have been gained on their behalf. It’s a rare moment where you sense Norton perhaps speaking through his character, although the novelist maintains that his personal experience as a young gay man finding his way through life was smooth in comparison with others.
“I did the easy thing,” he says. “I went to London where there were loads of gays and you could hide and life was easy. I think to be openly gay in a smaller city like Dublin or Cork, where people know your parents, that’s much harder. The fact that people didn’t all just f**k off to London, they stayed and stood out in the rain, and they got people to sign petitions, they went on marches and they wrote letters, that’s the work that I’m reaping the reward from when I come back. I want to acknowledge that. I am aware this didn’t happen by magic. This happened because lots of people did lots of really boring campaigning.”
Did he ever campaign? “I’ve been on marches,” he says. “But the real campaigners, they are in damp flats, writing letters, doing the emails all year round. That’s the proper work.”
It’s work that continues in 2024. “If you’re fighting to get a right, it seems to me that’s a clear demand. Now the fight, it seems to me, is to hold on to those rights. I don’t know how you do that fight. There are still some very angry people out there and they would like you to lose right[s] in order to make them feel better about some sh*t. You feel for young gays now who got born into a world of, more or less, equality. Now people are starting to chip away at that. I hope the young gays are up for the fight. It’s going to be a very strange fight, because you don’t know when you’ve won it.”
Norton writes in an austere, almost old-fashioned style, tackling these themes indirectly: his main character Frankie is an attractive, sometimes easily led, straight woman, who falls in love with an artist in New York. The tone of Norton’s books is markedly different from the gabby, wisecracking Graham of the chatshows – or even of his two memoirs – and that’s intentional. These are books for a broad audience and this is writing that goes down easy: Norton’s books are like a warm bath.
“I don’t write these books for my mother,” Norton says. “But if my mother didn’t enjoy these books, I would feel slightly like I’d failed. We read a lot of the same books, we talk about books. I don’t have an audience or a reader in mind. But there’s a sort of book: and I guess it is the sort of book that my mother would enjoy.”
Is it the kind of novel he could have envisaged himself writing aged 20? “No, that’s why I’m so grateful I was too lazy and busy to write a book when I was 20. That’s when I wanted to write, when I was at university. But it would have been cynical, hard-edged and hateful. Coming to fiction in my 50s, you have more empathy.”
Zadie Smith has written in the past about the question of whether, in order to be a good writer, you need to be a good person. While that might be a bit strong, there’s a sense that Norton the child had a lot of hurdles to overcome – and that perhaps there were times when he shut himself down emotionally in order to survive some of the tougher aspects of his youth and young manhood; his feeling that he didn’t quite fit in.
When Norton thinks back on his childhood, he views himself as a kid who had to mount a defence of himself and be on his guard. “When I went to school, my mother said to me, ‘Don’t react’ because that’s what bullies want. My poor parents, sending this fey little boy off to school, they must have thought, God knows what we’re going to get back at the end of the day. But I wasn’t bullied. And if people tried to, I shut it down. I didn’t react.” He pauses. “That’s very good for dealing with bullies, but less good for everything else.”
Even now, Norton is cautious about putting himself out there emotionally. It’s obvious from his work that he puts enormous heart and thought into it – but he’s reluctant to sound like he commits himself so thoroughly. Actor and writer Lena Dunham uses a phrase to describe her painting, which is that it’s a “credible hobby”. Norton likes to employ that line to casually downplay his writing career – a dismissal that seems more and more of a nonsense with the publication of each new bestseller, despite his cheerful protestations. “I take the books seriously,” he says. “I try to make them as good as possible. But I will never be a writer in the way a full-time writer is.”
And yet: here he is. Five novels in, with a new book that is about to top the charts for many months.
Is he as ambitious for himself as he once was?
“I would say I was never ambitious,” Norton says in his bright, jocular way.
His Wikipedia page might disagree.
“I have done all this stuff,” he nods. “And I clearly wanted to do it and got myself in a situation where it’s happening or happened. But my career has so far exceeded what I imagined or dreamt for myself. I literally just wanted to pay the rent and bills, doing what I wanted to do.” He smiles. “And it’s not like I’ve been digging ditches all these years. I’ve enjoyed it all.”
Frankie, the new novel by Graham Norton, is published by Coronet. Graham Norton will be signing copies of the book in Eason, St Patricks St. in Cork, on Friday September 6th at 4pm. Tickets available online via Easons.com