Hodder £18.99 pp342
There is only one possible reason for a book such as this, the autobiography of a television personality. And that is to take us behind the gurning, grotesque mask of the spangly suited presenter, and explain something of the real man behind it. It should give us some insight into why Graham Norton and his fans were so obsessed, five gruelling nights a week, with celebrity, bitchery and bodily functions. But So Me does no such thing. It is merely a laborious extension of Norton’s telly persona: ignorant, spiteful and barely raising a laugh.
Norton was born into a Protestant family in the heart of Catholic west Cork. How and why? It is never explained. Aside from a few brief and unevocative memories, and the fact that he went to school with Fred Astaire’s grandson, Norton tells us nothing of his boyhood. He does, however, find space to tell his old school to “f*** off”, for never having asked him back to give a speech or cut a ribbon. Throughout the book, we are given virtually no sense of a real human being. Instead we are supposed to be more interested in what kind of towels Sharon Stone has in her bathroom (leopard-pattern Ralph Lauren, if you must know), or the fact that Mariah Carey will drink soda only through a straw, while one of her stooges holds the bottle for her.
After school, Norton worked as a waiter, tried to get into drama school, and did stand-up comedy. From an early age he had “loved being in front of an audience”, and he flourished. His act was spotted by talent scouts, and his ascent up the greasy aerial of television fame and fortune was swift. He won a role in Father Ted, whose curious innocence and genuine comic brilliance seem so utterly at odds with Norton’s brand of humour; and then progressed to hosting a television game-show called Carnal Knowledge, which consisted of “104 contestants telling us every tawdry detail of their sex life . . . ” The grammar is sloppy, but the “tawdry” is instructive. And that contempt for his poor, deluded, famous-for-15-seconds contestants is only underlined by his account of what happened when he and his co-presenter, Maria McErlane, emerged from the studio after the show to look for a taxi. As a direct result of this televisual feast of sexual confessions, they came upon “a contestant and her boyfriend’s mother having a full-blown fist-fight in the car park . . . For a moment we toyed with the idea of stepping in to try and diffuse (sic) the situation, but only for a moment. We drove off as they fought on”.
But this was the sort of stuff that we wanted, apparently. Before too long, the bottomlessly cynical commissioners and controllers of our television stations were coming to call, and So Graham Norton was launched on Channel 4. The show was a popular mix of cruelty and fatuity, giving us Mo Mowlam, then a cabinet minister, officiating at a dog wedding, another woman playing tunes on a penny whistle with what Norton calls her “tuppenny”, and another woman called Madame Pee Pee, whose performance involved “a brandy glass and bodily fluids”. Everyone is degraded on Norton’s show, but women especially. And anyone who objects to this consistently dehumanised, degraded view of humanity, or Norton’s own simultaneous obsession and disgust with sex, is dismissed as “right-wing”, for some mysterious reason.
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Soon the BBC, its former Reithian principles of public service broadcasting rather forgotten in all the excitement, was offering Norton £5m (yes, £5m) to defect. For a while he said no, and stayed on at Channel 4, telling jokes about the death of Maurice Gibb the day after he died of a heart attack; encouraging a member of his audience to describe how he had made a dog ejaculate by accident; and another, how he had given his mother crabs.
In retrospect, Norton is “enormously proud” of his achievement, and some time soon he will be heading for our screens again, courtesy of the BBC at last. He is also huge in America these days. Travelling over there recently with his boyfriend Scott, he tells us, they just had to go and look at the site of the Oklahoma bombing. “Although not directly related to a celebrity, death on that scale meant that the site was on Scott’s ‘to see’ list.” And there, words fail me.
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