Graham Norton says he started to feel “uncomfortable” on his Channel 4 chat show because it was “straight men who were writing these jokes and straight men who were producing the show”.
“I kind of started to kick back then,” the 57-year-old host says. “It went too far for me. All the jokes were just about anal sex and blowjobs,” he added.
In 2005, he departed Channel 4 for the BBC, leaving behind “a whole team creating Graham Norton the caricature. I had a stylist who would come up with all these mad suits that I was happy to wear... I looked nuts”.
Norton, who has announced he is leaving BBC Radio 2 after 10 years, told Samira Ahmed on the How I Found My Voice podcast, run by Intelligence Squared, that he now feels “much more comfortable in my skin”.
It was partly related to his age, Norton explained. He got the Channel 4 gig in his mid-thirties, and finished a decade later.
“Clearly, I wasn’t that guy in the big suits running up the stairs waving dildos around. That just seemed really unseemly for a man over 40.”
He continued: “I think it’s taken me a while — maybe 10 years — in my fifties I feel much more comfortable in my skin. I feel I get who I am now, whereas I didn’t then.”
Life begins at 50.
Punks find Camden streets pretty vacant
Punks in Camden Town
Getty ImagesCovid is devastating the tourist-reliant punks of Camden. “Right now there are maybe three or four punks in Camden Town, but last year there were 20 of us,” Anderson Garcia Rodrigues (left) told the Camden New Journal. He poses with tourists for cash with the sign: “Help a punk get drunk”. Hurry that vaccine up.
Childhood ‘friend’ says Ivanka has been torching democracy
Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka
APIvanka Trump’s childhood “best friend”, who bonded with her during an illicit day trip to London, has written a Vanity Fair piece damning President Trump’s daughter, left. Lysandra Ohrstrom describes watching as “the person who used to pluck ingrown hairs from your bikini line suddenly appoints herself to the role of unelected public official and begins to torch democracy.” Ouch.
It’s hopeless - I was destined to be a comedian, says Djalili
Omid Djalili attends the after party following the press night performance of “Bend It Like Beckham”
Dave BenettOmid Djalili says his family story is “probably what made me become a comedian”. Djalili — currently on our screens in the BBC’s His Dark Materials — was born in London to parents who had arrived from Iran. “I always felt I should be some kind of representative, a bridge between East and West,” the comic told a Refugee Nights event yesterday, explaining: “The way to do that was to make fun of myself.” He went on: “One of my first jokes was about my name: Omid means ‘hope’, which it does in Persian. It’s a shame Djalili means ‘less’.”
SW1A
The MP of the Year Awards say the results of the public vote are “inconclusive” due to an “irregularity”. Organisers Patchwork Foundation did not clarify to The Londoner what the “irregularity” was. Some loyal Corbynistas have raised their eyebrows, thinking their man was in pole position. The results of only the judge’s panel award will be announced early next month. Stop the count!
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Claire Perry, the former climate change minister, has no love lost for a certain ousted Downing Street aide. “Dominic Cummings told me he didn’t understand the green stuff,” Perry told Times Radio this morning. She went on: “He said it didn’t matter to people in Red Wall seats, it’s just an obsession of posh boys in southern seats.” Perry suggested a new hashtag: “#make government saneagain”. Both barrels.
