Graham Norton: ‘Ireland is a country. I’m scared of those who are and have changed their minds

YesIn West Cork we had a chat with Raham Norton Chip, where he spent most of his time when his unnamed BBC TV show did not air, and he repaired during the lockdown. Despite the depressing weather – Hurricane Ellen continues to wreak havoc in the west, and next week there will be flooding of roads and power outages across the region – and every day worse and worse news, he is quietly moving on with his other careers, and publishing his third novel, Home stretch. “You know,” he says, “when I was re-reading the evidence, it was going to hell with a lockdown, Black Lives Matter and the world in a handcart, and I kind of thought, I wrote an incredibly Polyanna version of the world but I like the world.” Even if there is a version. “

This is a light-hearted feature of his writing, but not entirely accurate. Although his novels are undoubtedly story-based, plot-driven and warmly entertaining – he described them first, Retention, As a “yarn” – they are not without darkness. His second, A keeperDescribe the length that rural isolation will go in search of those partners, and Home stretch The devastation centered on a visit to a small town after a fatal car accident. Presented to us from 1987 to the present day, it focuses on an underlying theme of Irish life and literature – the relationship between those who remain and those who leave their families and communities – and paints a clear picture of gay evolution in Ireland. Life

The second theme, he said, happened almost accidentally. When I suggest that the novel is first and foremost about sex, he replies, “Well, now it’s over,” explaining that he wrote, facing the possibility, that in all of this conversation, it’s now gay in Ireland. It’s like being and being gay in Ireland in the mid-1980s. But I didn’t do it on purpose. I should probably claim that I did. “

But when it came, it was impossible to imagine without the book. One of its main characters, Connor, forced him to leave the small, fictional town of Mullinmore after taking part in a car accident; But he is also hiding his homosexuality and will have to go to New York with Liverpool’s building sites and London’s squats and bars before he can live freely.

His story is in stark contrast to that of his nephew Finbar, who found himself, 20 years later, in 2015, going to an exhibition in Dublin to celebrate gay history and activism in Ireland. “How did they take risks in Dublin in the seventies and eighties? The future becomes brighter for her, they are happy without knowing how bright the future can be. They sat, without touching only the camera showing what they could do to their happiness. Finbar thought of his uncle Connor in Mullinmore. Did he know that these bars and men existed? He doubted it. ”

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Norton especially liked the scene: “I was really impressed by the courage of those people and the affection of those who are there. Who will stay? You know, we are a country of hijackers. This is what we do. We leave at the minute we don’t have a job. The world loves us and whatever we do, we go somewhere else. So people who have fought and changed their minds and changed their laws: I am afraid of them. ‘

Norton’s own departure from Ireland was not overshadowed by any traumatic event like the Coroner’s, nor was there a sense of shame. Rather he was attracted to adventure and – the identity of the fame he had achieved – relieved the anonymous ridicule. Growing up he wanted to be an actor, but found no way out of Bandon, a town in West Cork where he spent some of his childhood; The family moved across the country because of his late father’s job, Guinness reports, but Bandon ended up there and his mother still lives there. He knew no drama school, no actor, no template to follow; So he moved to the University of Cork and later to France and London for the summer.

“And this was my first long time out of the country. And it was just great, I just loved it. I fell in love. It is. And then I came back to Cork and didn’t really like it. My first year at university, there was an anonymous one that was just awful. And then with some fluke I did really well in my first year exams, especially in English. And suddenly the lecturers knew who I was, the tutors knew I didn’t show up … and I hated it. “

He pauses. “I wanted out, out, out. I know. Looks like there’s a distortion in this story. So wait, you want to reveal the name?” Sorry? But I did! “

Graham Norton Show
From left: Norton in 2019 with guests Ian McKellen, Julie Andrews, Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Dua Lipa. Photo: Isabelle Infantes / PA

Whatever the conflict, Norton left his studies incomplete and ended up in London and drama school. Then came the time to wait for the phone to ring, at a time when “nobody cares. I just didn’t get a job. I got a job at Harrogate, got a job at Liverpool, but it didn’t really work out that way.” Well documented in two memoirs Something And, a decade later, The Lives And love is a devil, Put a tea towel on his head and started pretending to be Mother Teresa – “joking for 15 seconds”, he says now, but he was able to work it out on the Edinburgh show (“I had a kind of Bulgarian voice, singing music, lots of candles” “) And it has entered its standup comedy. When Channel 5 was launched and looking for new talent, Norton was there; And from there to Channel 4, Radio 4’s The weakest part And, in 2007, on BBC television.

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In the vein of the room-service waiter who interrogated the champagne-swirling George Best where it all went wrong, I ask Norton, through all of this he secretly talked about being a nove panacea? She laughs. “Behind my head, when I was very young, yes, I wanted to write novels. But you know, when I was very young, I was out. Who is writing novels at home? When you find the author of 22 or 23, do you really like it? Are you sitting at home long enough to write a novel? I didn’t have a long time to write a novel until my fifties. “

As he wrote the autobiographies, he was confident that, “Actually, I can at least churn out a lot of those words. I can fill in one thing,” but again, there is a slip that makes me wonder when he began to consider the novels so seriously. , Was he worried that people might think they were possessed by ghosts?

Holding, Norton's first novel
Retention, Norton’s first novel

“If people wanted to think it was ghostly, what would you do?” He replied. His biggest fear was “Morse’s thing people laugh and go, it’s the worst book ever written”. So he challenged himself to imagine the event, and then lived: “And so the worst for me was, it came out, it got a response from Morris, you allowed your friends to enjoy this moment. And then in a year, Six months on, it’s over. Most of the people who watch my TV shows probably don’t read book reviews, so their chances of encountering this book were slim. So hopefully it won’t hurt the show. You know, it’s not right. That I decided, well, on this week’s show, I’m going to read my book aloud. “It was, he admits, very good when it didn’t get too bad.

Wherever he wants to go, Norton writes, but much has happened in West Cork, where the pace of life is much slower than in London or locked up. He prefers not to talk about his personal life and says that setting his books is a way to differentiate himself from this: “I wanted people to be able to read books and forget that Graham Norton wrote the telegraph. I ended up in West Cork in the 70’s. The main reason was was I comment, the books take us back in time and in most cases are set in smaller towns and villages than in towns. “They don’t know,” he replies. “I mean I know Cork a bit, but you call me Dublin. I’ll be lost if I put it in. I was born just outside Dublin, but I don’t know.

And now for decades in the UK, what about his home? It sometimes appears more than momentarily in his fiction. “I don’t know those places here as well. I can say I know London, but you know, I’ve covered a lot of English cities and English villages, but I don’t really know what shops are on these streets. “I got his point: when I asked him if Mullinmore was based on Bandon, he told me that it was more of a massup than the Cork cities of Skibbren and Dunmanway; as an Irishman, I knew what that meant, but I’m not sure. “There are a lot of charity shops. We’re raising a lot of money for cancer. But look, I’m going to do a weird thing, where I’m going to say ‘we’re raising a lot of money,'” he said. And so I have That Things, because I’ve been there since 1984; I have a career, I have friends, I pay taxes there, I voted there. And I work for the British Broadcasting Corporation. So there is an idea that my tribe. Of course I got a tribe that I could be part of that country. And so, I’ve said it before, but that’s the thing where I’m in London, I get on the plane and I’m going to Ireland. But when I move here in September, I’m going home to London. And I think you can do it. I don’t think we need to polish that strictly. “

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I’m saying enough, but that fluid attitude doesn’t seem to apply if he hosts Eurovision And, for an evening, throws her plenty with the Brits. He flinches ridiculously. “Eurovision People go about nuts Eurovision. And you know, I got it, I understand why, “he says of those who objected to him speaking out effectively, as it were, a British voice.” But I think I think: ‘Do you think I’m a British broadcaster? Should it be said in such a way as to understand the corporation’s audience? ‘ If their correspondent, their commentator is doing well, ‘they’ have done very well. Who are the ‘stars’? So it makes me roll my eyes, anyone is practicing about that. If you define patriotism or nationalism in this way, then, yes, the big old earl. “

When will Norton’s Cork solitude end? Graham Norton Show The BBC returns in October. It will naturally be a different show, with a mix of huge small studio listeners and “sofa” guests and a mix of video links including video rink Ahmed and Dolly Parton. “We’ll get in trouble on our way,” he says. “What I like about it is that we’re still being challenged after 22 years of this work … and so it’s kind of great, we’re all suddenly very interested again, because there’s no coast. Everyone has to work hard. Guests have to log in bloody! “

Home stretch Is Published by Coronet (ড 20). Visit GuardianBookshop.com to order a copy. Delivery charges may apply.

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About the Author: Rusty Kemp

Tv ninja. Lifelong analyst. Award-winning music evangelist. Professional beer buff. Incurable zombie specialist.

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