Graham Norton: After my father died I realised the Irish qualities I'd dismissed were so beautiful

The genial face of chatshow TV is back with Queen of the Universe. He discusses the joy of Eurovision, his late start as a novelist — and his even later marriage

Graham Norton pictured in Bantry House for the West Cork Literary Festival. Picture: Darragh Kane

The second series of Queen of the Universe, the drag queen singing competition hosted by Graham Norton, has something unspoken about it: it is like a show about something else, camouflaged as classic, competition-format reality TV. The contestants are all so nice to one another, so supportive; Norton is so nice; the judges are all so nice. Take the niceness of Bake Off and multiply it by a thousand, and you are still nowhere close to how much the contestants are rooting for one another, even though they would all clearly appreciate the $250,000 prize for themselves.

I ask Norton if he ever wishes that there was a bit more grit in the oyster? “Every now and again, there’s a little bit of grit in the oyster and it makes for great telly,” he says, adding: “It makes me so uncomfortable.” But then, to be real for a second: “I think the grit in the oyster is often the world around the drag performers. There’s so much grit out there; let’s just be nice shiny oysters in here. We had one contestant from India … well, a lot of them are trying to perform in countries where there really isn’t a safe space for them to do it. In season one, I hadn’t thought that through, stupidly. It broke my heart when they came around the corner into the studio with the audience cheering, the lights … It must have been like a waking dream — that they landed in this place, a huge mainstream television show with seemingly a limitless budget.”