NO, Graham Norton…

What do you do if you’ve got a popular late-night chat show, well suited to its Friday night time slot? Why you put it on five nights a week of course!

So say Channel Four, who have re-branded So Graham Norton as V Graham Norton, and put it on every weeknight for thirteen weeks. But does it deserve its newfound status? Let’s have a look at the shows content.

The title sequence is as camp as Christmas. Mind you, so is the host, so its no real surprise. However, the sequence may alienate some of the straight fans, particularly if they are watching with their mates and wish to appear butch.

The new set has exactly the same layout as the old one, despite appearing radically changed. Simply changing the furniture and putting up a big red curtain doesn’t fool anybody into thinking the show is original and in any way separate to its previous incarnation.

Each show starts with Graham doing a bit of stand-up. I can safely say that this is the worst stand-up to be televised since the last time Ruby Wax was on. Every single joke ends in some sort of sexual innuendo. Norton truly is the master of the single-entendre. The annoying thing is that the comedy pretends to be topical. Simply taking the name of somebody in the news and placing it in a pre-written innuendo, which inevitably ends with the celebrity being accused of various sexual misdemeanours, does not constitute topicality. And the recent content has made me wonder whether he’d spend so much time discussing Big Brother if he wasn’t on Channel Four straight after the daily updates from the house.

The stand-up invariably leads into members of the audience relaying their sexual anecdotes. This is usually rather amusing, however the links between the topic that Graham asks for and the story he gets are tenuous at best. If you’ve got a story about getting caught having sex, you can fit it into any of the categories Graham asks for.

However, the most intensely irritating part of the show is the introductions for the guests. Graham dresses up as something vaguely related to his guest and releases a cornucopia of knob gags. The other day he dressed up as a comedy vicar for fuck’s sake. Complete with wonky teeth and innuendos regarding various vegetables being donated to the church fete. This sort of material was left dead and buried in the 70s, and Norton goes and revives it, to sycophantic applause from the audience. I wish I could believe that Norton is being ironic when he dresses up as vicars and such like, but he genuinely isn’t. He does actually think its funny.

And lest we forget, Norton is actually a rubbish interviewer. He stumbles over his words, asks the same old questions that all the other sub-standard chat show hosts ask and he interrupts his guests. But that’s okay, ‘cause it’s cute little Graham! And of course its hilarious when Graham finds a rude website with a tenuous connection with the guest. Graham of course has never been on the website before. Some researcher has searched for the guest’s name on Google and written down Graham’s witty observations on a card for him.

Norton also gets cheap laughs from encouraging his viewers to send in amusing things they find. Again, he always finds away to make them appear connected to the guest, whenever he wants an excuse to show a big novelty dildo or a foreign product called ‘Wank’ or something similar.

The entire programme smacks of laziness. There’s usually plenty of material to fill one show a week, but the team are stretched to find something amusing on a daily basis. Just lately, they’ve resorted to inviting odd guests, those who train snakes or swallow swords, just so they can fill up five minutes with Norton having to do very little except for looking shocked. This is a trick that not even the worst light entertainment shows use nowadays. And this from a channel that has always prided itself on its interesting and alternative programming.

Page added… 12 June 2002.