Authors: Graham Norton
Graham Stuart came to see the show and afterwards was full of excitement. We could use the telephone idea in the chat show that he was preparing to pitch to Channel 4. ‘Yes, that’s right – whatever.’ Standing in a suspicious puddle in an alley outside the Assembly Rooms, I was finding it hard to take his offer seriously.
Every year at the Edinburgh Festival a strange fever sweeps through all the comics. Almost before anyone gets to Scotland they begin to talk about who is going to be
nominated for the Perrier Prize, and then, as the days turn to weeks, the talk becomes an obsession. Sometimes it is described as the comedy Oscar, but I think of it more as the comedy Booker or Turner Prize – the people involved and the media think it is wildly important while the vast majority of the population couldn’t give a shit. I knew that quite a few Perrier judges had been to see my show, but I didn’t think too much about it. In past years I had got sucked into the nominations speculation and then been terribly let down when I wasn’t. This year I didn’t care. I really and truly didn’t care. I couldn’t have cared less. The list of nominations was announced and I was on it. All right, I cared a bit.
I honestly didn’t think I was going to win, which is just as well because I didn’t. The announcement was made at midnight after all the nominated acts had finished their shows. We all crammed into an old German beer tent, and the announcement was made. ‘And the winner is . . .’ And that was the moment when I hated myself. I knew that there was less chance of me winning than of the Irish basketball team carrying off the Olympic gold, and yet in that little pause after ‘winner is’ some awful tiny self-deluded part of my brain couldn’t help but pipe up, ‘It could be me!’
The winners were the League of Gentlemen. ‘Hurrah! Well done!’ I cheered and clapped as loudly as everyone else. On a deeply shallow level, though, I really didn’t mind. Firstly because the League of Gentlemen were brilliant, and secondly because the trophy for the runners up was much prettier than the winner’s gold bottle of Perrier.
Back in London I did a few more weeks standing in for Jack Docherty. Although I still enjoyed it, the atmosphere
had changed. The series producer I really respected had gone, and some days I felt quite exposed. Also, because Channel Five wasn’t really taking off as people had hoped, it was becoming increasingly difficult to get guests for the show. This was when I really grew to rely on Graham Stuart. He wasn’t supposed to be working on this show in a very hands-on way, but each lunchtime he left United and came over to the show to go through the script and the interviews with me. He had worked on a vast number of chat shows over the years and his suggestions usually made a lot of sense. I began to wonder if the idea of us putting together our own show for Channel 4 wasn’t that far-fetched after all.
I had never been so busy. A new series of
Bring Me the
Head of Light Entertainment
was in the pipeline, and as well as guest-hosting
The Jack Docherty Show
I was appearing on lots of other comedy panel shows and doing more and more live gigs. It was around this time that if my name was mentioned in the paper, it was tagged with the word ‘ubiquitous’. Although it went against all my instincts, I began to turn down jobs. I remembered what had happened to Tony Slattery when he’d seemed to be on TV all the time, and I was determined not to have it happen to me. There are all sorts of ways to wreck your career – one is to say yes to too many jobs, and another is to say yes to the wrong job. Although I’d never thought of myself as very ambitious or the sort of person who had a career plan, I liked my new life and I was going to try to keep it going for as long as possible.
I finally took a break and headed out to California for the long cross-country trek with Scott. For me the idea of Scott coming to Britain was very straightforward. I wanted him to
be with me, end of story. Of course, for Scott it was a very different thing. He was leaving everything and everyone he knew to come to a country full of strangers, bad weather, poor service and the sort of vehement anti-American feeling that you only become truly aware of when you are living with an American. Worst of all, he was leaving his dog behind. Seeing Scott saying goodbye to Osso is one of the main reasons why I have never got a dog.
For some reason he wanted to bring his small grey wreck of a car all the way to Chicago with us. We pulled away from the kerb slowly in a huge truck packed full of all of his belongings, with his car on a trailer behind it. Like a couple of very dull circus performers we steered our caravan of love towards the desert.
Given that I had already crossed America by road nearly twenty years earlier, I don’t know why its huge size took me so much by surprise. We thought we would give ourselves an easy first day, so we eased ourselves off the coast and across towards Las Vegas, which according to the map was very near. Hours later in the dead of night we were still rumbling along in the desert. Then in the distance there appeared to be a beam of light shining up into the night sky. The nearer we got the brighter and bolder it seemed. Like Jesus in reverse, we followed the star to find the gold, and if the wise men were fat, old and badly dressed, there were way more than three of them. I love Las Vegas. It is such a pointless, amazing place. Jaw-droppingly awful, but undeniably impressive. Paris full of friendly Americans, Venice with extra slot machines, New York with a rollercoaster subway – why would anyone go anywhere else? We managed to park our mighty convoy, and almost before we
had booked into our hotel we were shoving coins into slots.
The next morning, poorer but sadly not wiser, we headed out to do a quick bit of sightseeing before we headed on. Scott had very specific tourist’s demands. If it had something to do with a dead celebrity then it was on the itinerary. Las Vegas had the Liberace museum. Whatever you think it is going to be like, that’s not the way it is. The collection is housed in a little shopping centre in the suburbs. The other businesses in the centre hint at the different kinds of visitors the museum gets – there’s a shop selling religious artefacts and a gay bar called Good Times. I’m sure Liberace would have enjoyed the irony. On the day we went, most other people seemed to have missed a few newspaper stories. A talcum powder cloud of old ladies gathered around the till in the gift shop. ‘Tell me, dear, how did he die?’ They trundled back towards their bus muttering about how dangerous a bad cold can be.
Back on the road stretching endlessly into the distance, splitting the empty world into two, we stopped to see a large asteroid crater: we stood behind a small rail with other dead-eyed travellers staring into what appeared to be a large hole in the ground. We followed signs to see a petrified forest. If you haven’t been in a petrified forest, let me tell you that the most common wildlife to be found in one is the bored tourist. Then we took a sharp right, drove for two hours, saw Billy the Kid’s grave, and then drove two hours back to where we’d turned off.
Most nights were spent in low-price motels watching TV, but there were a few evenings where the end of our driving day coincided with our arrival in a big town. Amarillo in northern Texas was one of them. We had a shower and then
checked out our gay guide to America. Sure enough there was a gay bar. We probably should have guessed that it wasn’t going to be very busy, given that we were able to park our massive truck-and-car combo right outside. Inside it was a typical provincial gay crowd, which is to say that the place wasn’t a gay bar at all. It was just a place for all the people in town who didn’t fit in anywhere else.
We sat at the bar and ordered our beers. The woman next to us started to talk. I guessed the drink she was spilling over my jeans wasn’t the first one that she had enjoyed that evening.
‘Where are you from?’
I told her.
‘I’m going to visit there soon,’ she said.
‘Really? When?’
‘Not sure. Just got a few things to sort out.’
She then went on to tell us what those few things were: her mother had disowned her when she ran off and married the local drug dealer. He turned out to be abusive so she left him and was now trying to piece her life back together. Things, however, were now going great. She had finally reconciled with her sister, in fact tonight was really special because her sister had asked her to watch her kids.
‘Oh, and weren’t you able to?’ I asked.
She looked at me with a puzzled face, then glanced at her unsteady drink.
‘Oh, I see. No, no, they’re out in the car.’
‘The car?’
‘Yeah, just outside. Do you want to come out there and share a joint?’
We politely declined. One of life’s great mysteries had
been solved: I now knew where they found the guests for the Jerry Springer show.
Oklahoma was memorable, but again not for any good reason. The bomb in the federal building had blown the heart out of the city. Although not directly related to a celebrity, death on that scale meant that the site was on Scott’s ‘to see’ list. A high chain-link fence covered in dead flowers, rain-soaked teddies and curl-cornered photos marked out the enormous death plot. In another time and place it could have been an eclectic art installation, but here it was just an enormous improvised monument to what stupidity and fear can achieve. I don’t know how I expected to feel, but it made me horribly uncomfortable and awkward, as if I had intruded upon a moment of private grief. Scott took his photos while I hovered by the truck. We drove on.
Finally the mammoth trek was over, the things in storage and Scott finally parted with his car, which he gave to a friend. It was time for our new life together in London.
During our trip we had addressed all the pitfalls, dangers and risks of living together and talked endlessly about them. Moving somewhere just to be with someone was never a good idea. One person supporting the other often causes problems. Scott wasn’t going to be able to work and I was really his only friend in the UK. I reassured him and stroked his arm. This was going to be different. Our love would be enough.
The first thing we had to do was get Scott a work permit. I’m sure if we had been clever or if I had thrown money at the right sort of lawyer this wouldn’t have been too difficult, but being naïve, full of love and badly advised we joined the Stonewall Immigration Group. I don’t mean to suggest that
there is anything wrong with Stonewall, which is a political organisation that lobbies Parliament for equal rights for gay men and lesbians, but when we joined there was no legislation in place that recognised same-sex partners so we became just another test case trying to change the law.
We went to a meeting to get some advice and the name of a lawyer who would take our case. When we walked into the room I was struck by the number of older men sitting beside very beautiful Brazilian and Asian men. Bastards! I glanced at Scott and, much as I loved him, I admit that for a split second I did feel slightly short-changed.
We were told that we would have to put together a lengthy application to the Home Office. This was not simply a matter of filling out forms, it also required a folder of evidence of our relationship, photographs, airplane tickets, that sort of thing; and also, most embarrassingly, letters from mutual friends bearing testament to our love. The thought of asking people like Nicola, Helen and Maria to describe what a lovely couple we made made me feel slightly sick.
Scott immediately contacted his family and the letters started to pour in. I couldn’t ask mine because unbelievably the subject of my sexuality had still not been raised. The way I thought about it was that if I had been my parents’ neighbours’ son they would have known, so if they really didn’t want to know that I was gay by now, it was their choice.
I was doing a TV show in Dublin so I thought I would take the opportunity to bring Scott over to Ireland to meet my parents. This wasn’t intended to be some gay rite of passage; I just thought it would be nice for him to meet them and see where I had grown up. As we stepped from
the train in Cork I was surprised to see my sister Paula, rather than my father, waiting for us. Sure enough, on the drive back to Bandon my obviously embarrassed sister tried as casually as she could to drop into conversation a message from my mother. ‘She told me to tell you that you’re not to upset your father.’ Now I’m not sure what my mother thought was going to happen – did she think Scott was going to turn up in an A-line dress and some size twelve high heels? – but the message was clear.
In any event, the meeting was fine. Then a few months later I made my usual weekly phone call to my mother. She answered, sounding a bit distant.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Well, no, no, I’m not,’ she replied.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I just think it would have been nice if you had told your family certain things before you announced them on television,’ she said curtly.
‘What?’
It turned out that as part of some show I had made with Rapido for Channel 4 I had done some joke about being Irish and gay. I had made similar jokes before on other shows, but this was obviously the first one that that she had seen.
‘But you told me not to tell you!’
‘I did not!’
‘You said I wasn’t to upset my father.’
‘Well, I didn’t want you to.’
‘And was he?’
‘Well, no. It turns out he had guessed.’
‘And you knew?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what’s upsetting you?’
‘I just think it’s such a lonely life.’
This was of course the parental cliché, but it goes to the very heart of why parents are upset to find out their child is gay. It’s not about homophobia, it’s just their worry that you won’t be happy. I assured her that I wasn’t lonely and that I was very happy, and that was the end of the only conversation I have ever had with my mother about my sexuality.
I don’t really know how Scott filled his time, but I seemed to be away a great deal, either at gigs or sitting on a minibus coming back from Norwich in the middle of the night. The good thing was that yet again I was earning even more than I had been and the extra expense of the new flat and my live-in lover weren’t causing any financial strain. Given that Scott hadn’t grown up in a wealthy family and hadn’t been earning very much in LA, he took to money like a duck to bottled water. It wasn’t long before he was filling his time by looking for a bigger place for us to live. Of course I didn’t say anything – God forbid I should rock the boat – but I did feel that the love nest I had spent so much time finding and working for in order to pay the rent had been rejected.