Graham Norton on life off camera and his debut novel Holding

Graham Norton’s debut novel – a murder story set in a fictional West Cork town – is one of the best books you’ll read this year. How can one man have so many talents, wonders Caroline O’Doherty.

You might imagine that feeling sorry for Graham Norton would take quite a bit of effort but there is a moment in conversation when there comes a terrific urge to ring up random numbers in Hollywood and berate whoever answers for their thoughtlessness towards him.

He’s talking about how life is when his weekly celebrityfest, The Graham Norton Show on BBC1, is over, the audience leaves, the lights go down and the heartthrobs, pin-ups, Oscar winners and box office magnets go out to play.

“We record on a Thursday so often on a Friday morning I’ll see pictures online and in the papers of the guests leaving a restaurant, having dinner, going to a party. And where am I?

"I could have gone if anyone asked me but it wouldn’t cross their mind to ask me because I’m like the help, I’m the staff,” he says, adopting the expression of a wounded puppy.

“I notice it often when the band is playing and there’s a break in the conversation and the people on the couch suddenly all turn in to each other and they chat and have a marvellous time between themselves. I’m just like part of the furniture.

“It’s fine — don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining,” he says stoically.

”I just think it’s an interesting dynamic. People at home watching think ‘oh look, they’re all getting on great and must be good friends’ but no, lines are not crossed.”

But as quickly as a picture of Norton sitting Cinderella-like by a cold hearth springs to mind, the urge to act on it disappears. Because he’s actually sitting in the lovely Merrion Hotel in Dublin, soon to meet an adoring audience, grinning broadly at his lot.

And why wouldn’t he be? He’s the Corkman who conquered Britain, possibly the highest paid broadcaster in the BBC with the number one chat show and a knack for making memorable TV.

He allows himself a little regret at not getting Brad and Angelina to appear before they required a UN peace-keeping force to maintain calm between them but he’s chuffed that he bagged the likes of George Clooney and Maggie Smith who steadfastly rebuff the talk show circuit.

So even though he’s very much the middleman on screen, a celebrity in his own right but one who identifies with the audience when the megastars place their million dollar bottoms on his couch, it’s a very nice middle ground to hold.

Besides, if he turned full-throttle celebrity, it’s unlikely he would have achieved his latest feat, the reason he’s in Ireland — the publication of his first novel.

Two days after it hit the bookshops here, Holding was top of the bestsellers list and there’s not a palm tree, cocktail or blindingly white set of porcelain veneers to be found in its 300-odd pages.

When advance copies hit critics’ desks in recent weeks, a common reaction was surprise, not just at the quality of the writing but at the complete absence of irreverence and smut from a man who’s made a career out of double entendres and naughty nudges and whose prior literary endeavours were confined to two raucous memoirs.

Norton says he takes no offence at being typecast.

“People didn’t know who I was from a hole in the ground before I went into television so I’ve created my own television persona and you can’t then turn around and go, why does everyone think I’m like that? I know why they think I’m like that because for years that’s what I was doing on TV.

“The people writing about it are surprised this is the book I wrote. I’m surprised this is the book I wrote.”

Holding is the story of the fictional west Cork village of Duneen where the discovery of human remains on land being broken for the first bit of new building since the recession brings to the surface secrets and sorrows that had lain buried for more than 20 years.

It’s a sad story in essence but Norton’s characters, in particular the portly and lonely Garda Sergeant PJ Collins, another middle man in a community where he is neither local nor outsider, are not lost causes.

Stuck in an interminable holding pattern, their lives are going in no particular direction, but they’re doing their best as real people do and it’s impossible as a reader not to want to will them on.

Norton says he wrote the book purely for pleasure, enjoying rare alone time with his keyboard away from his other jobs which tend to involve large teams of people, many meetings and lots of opinions.

At least that’s what he thought he thought.

“When I finished it I was telling myself I didn’t care if anyone liked it and I was steeling myself for slings and arrows and abject failure,” he says.

“But the minute you read a nice review or you hear it’s the number one book, it’s so pathetically pleasing that you realise, as it turns out, I really do care.”

So do his fans. The series of readings and questions and answers sessions he has been doing across Britain and which brought him to Dublin this week have been sold out and Norton is keen to repay the loyalty by putting on a good show.

“It’s an odd mix of book tour and stand-up. Yes, people have bought the book and they’ve come about the book but I haven’t stopped being Graham Norton off the telly so they expect a few laughs.

“The problem is the book isn’t very funny,” (he laughs) “so I’m trying to shoehorn in some celebrity gossip between the deep reflections on lost love.”

He’s not trying to stop being Graham Norton off the telly either.

“I think it would drive me crazy if it was my life,” he says of writing.

“Even though there’s been a very nice reaction to this I’m not going to go, that’s it, eureka, I’m a novelist and flee the television studio. I am very aware that I have a job and a career and this is a lovely treat.”

The BBC will be relieved. They’ve recruited him on to the presenters’ line-up for the annual Children in Need marathon fundraiser, although he gasps at the widely assumed notion that he is being brought on board to replace the late Terry Wogan.

“I’m not replacing Terry. I’m just being added to the roster. You can’t replace Terry and certainly not on Children in Need. This was Terry’s baby, a real passion project for him. He would do nine hours or something mad like that on air himself. A whole group of us will be sharing the load this time.”

Another fresh venture for Norton is BBC’s new talent show, Let It Shine, which is devised by Gary Barlow and has been auditioning to find five young men to sing Take That songs in a planned musical charting the band’s rise to superstardom.

He will be co-presenting and attempting to stifle giggles with Mel Giedroyc of the Great British Bake Off and says he is amazed by the standard of participant.

“There have been so many shows that you would think at some point there would be a bottom to the pool of talent, like we have reached ground zero, we’re done. But we have found some brilliant people along the way.”

All the same, he has mixed feelings about reality TV.

“I wonder if I was 18 now would I apply to be on Big Brother or something like that and I think I might have so I thank God I’m not 18.

“You’re in such a rush when you’re at that age and you think how can I make my mark, how can I get someone to notice me and that is a way to be noticed.

“The trouble is it’s an awful way to be noticed because you become famous for nothing and no one’s paying you so you’ve all the downside of fame with none of the perks. You’re just having people shouting at you on the streets but you don’t have a career or income stream to make up for it. It’s pretty grim.”

So he’s not likely to appear in a diary room or the jungle any time soon then?

“Oh I hope not. Those ones you just do for a cheque. That’s the only reason to go on those things.

“Some of the people on them, you think, if we’d known you were that hard up.... Like really, you should have just issued a press release saying unless I can raise this money I’m going to have to do Celebrity Big Brother. I mean, Rula Lenksa,” he says in mock horror, no doubt recalling the infamous scene where she went along with George Galloway pretending to be her cat.

“I’d have written a cheque to save her from that.”

In truth, he’s not likely to need anyone to pass round a collection tin for him. Along with the TV show, he has a Saturday morning radio programme on BBC2, an agony uncle column for the Daily Telegraph and a regular stint as wine blender for the Invivo vineyard.

That started out as a novelty for him, after he fell in love with the label’s sauvignon blanc when it was served up on his show but he’s now a shareholder with a knack for turning out very popular and critically acclaimed blends.

Not that he wants to be traipsing through the vineyard.

“It’s in New Zealand,” he says as if he’s just been asked to run across Death Valley in mid-summer.

He prefers to keep his jaunts local-ish, with a fondness for Italy and a huge love for his second home at Ahakista in west Cork — not

Duneen but a close relative.

He was there during the summer, will be back at the end of next month for his mum’s birthday and will pass a pleasant Christmas there too.

“It’s so weird that I like it here so much. I couldn’t wait to get out of here and now it’s my number one place to come.

“I think the older you become the harder London is. Every time I come back to it, I fall out of love with it just a tiny bit more. The mechanics of London are quite exhausting.”

He’s also hugely unimpressed with the city’s erstwhile mayor, one Boris Johnson.

As a BBC employee, Norton is not supposed to express political views but as an immigrant in Britain, he couldn’t resist having a go at the absurdity of the Brexit campaign.

He dismisses home secretary Amber Rudd’s recent speech in which she urged firms to make lists of their foreign workers as being “plagiarised from Mein Kampf”.

While Norton was never really in any danger of being booted out of Britain, his job will come under scrutiny in January when a cash-strapped BBC will be forced to disclose the salaries of its top stars. He says he’s ready for it, and can defend his earnings on the basis of the success of his shows.

“My wages are newsworthy because people have heard of me and it is public money so there has to be some degree of accountability. However, we can’t have a referendum on everyone’s wages which is kind of what people want.”

The impending kerfuffle is likely to make Norton long for an escape to Ahakista where he’s just Graham with the big house on the water’s edge whose wine sells in SuperValu and Centra, or at least to his office with his keyboard alone for company.

“My mother said a sweet thing after I sent her the novel to read. She said, oh I forgot you wrote it. It’s odd because I’m such a great big show-off but I was really pleased by that. I disappeared myself.”