Long before he was known as the BBC’s reigning king of Friday night entertainment, you might remember Graham Norton’s initial run fronting a chat show was a little less… glossy.
Running between 1998 and 2003, So Graham Norton and V Graham Norton saw the Irish comic interviewing cult celebrities and stars of the day, interspersed with games and segments that were usually cheeky, mostly outrageous and occasionally totally explicit.
“I did a book tour and I was showing clips of the old shows, and I’d forgotten how out there the Channel 4 show was,” Graham recently admitted to Ireland’s The Late Late Show. “It was so rude!”
He explained: “It’s hard to get guests on a new chat show anyway, but we were visiting dodgy websites, we were calling sex workers, so who the hell was going to come on this show? But we still asked everybody.”
You can imagine Graham’s surprise, then, when the famously squeaky clean Irish crooner Daniel O’Donnell somehow wound up getting booked in his talk show’s early days.
“I was delighted, and I just thought, ‘Daniel O’Donnell must have a really good sense of humour, that’s great!’,” Graham recalled.
“So, we put it in all the papers, ‘Daniel O’Donnell on So Graham Norton’, and that was all fine. Except the Friday before he was supposed to come on, either Daniel or someone from Team Daniel actually watched the show. And suddenly Daniel… very busy! That grass needs cutting!”
“That was fine,” Graham insisted, but apparently it was too late to pull the announcement from the newspaper about the singer’s now-cancelled booking. And as a result… a few of his fans wound up tuning in unnecessarily.
The five-time Bafta winner said: “It was a long time ago, forgive me, it was a different world. But we did an item where we did a web call to a woman in Paris called Madame Pee Pee. And you can imagine yourself, there was a brandy glass involved. Please don’t Google it.
“So we did it, and that was fine. Good fun. And back then, if you didn’t enjoy a show, you couldn’t just tweet the host, you had to call a special number, call the station, call the duty log.
“And on the Monday, we would get the list of phone calls that had come in to the station. So, we got the list – and if there was a Venn diagram of Madame Pee Pee fans and Daniel O’Donnell fans, I would say no cross-over at all, really.
“My favourite one was a woman who called in, and all she said was, ‘dear god, I’m supposed to be taping this for the nuns!’.”
These days, Graham has no issues booking guests for his BBC talk show, with everyone from Oscar-winning actors, world-famous singers and even big-name political figures joining him on the iconic red sofa.
However, earlier this year, Graham named the one A-lister with whom he’d still never managed to land an interview.