'Grammar langer' Graham Norton returns to Bandon as school history is launched

As Graham Norton strolled around his old school, maybe he got that sense many of us do when we walk down the corridors of the past - that uncanny feeling that we might just bump into our younger selves around the next corner.

If he did, the 56-year-old hid it well. Back at Bandon Grammar School, Norton was the centre of attention, a famous past pupil back to mark the launch of a history of what has been described as a "venerable institution" and a place where for years, students could expect "Grammar langer!" to be shouted at them every now and then by non-attendees. Well, it sort of rhymed.

The history has been written by school principal, Ian Coombes — a 20-year labour of love, but the comedian, novelist and chat show king brought the star power. Moreover, he brought perspective, insight as sharp as his natty suit and diesel-blue trench coat, and words of wisdom.

The students who besieged him for goodnatured selfies, the well-wishers and past pupils and the hundreds of people gathered in the sports hall all hung on every word.

Returning to school can give us the shakes, all those echoes and memories. Despite a stellar career, from stand-up success to Fr Noel Furlong and onto BBC stardom, joshing with the likes of De Niro, Smith and Streep, Graham feels the same way.

He admitted: "I still get the heebie jeebies coming back here.

It's still school and that kind of never goes away. The joy is - it's just an afternoon. I get to leave again.

That unmistakable laugh, the finely-tuned comic timing were present but he also had advice for children now, maybe those like his younger iteration.

He was "a fey little boy with no interest in sport", and while his school days weren't the best of his life ("don't peak too soon!", as he subsequently told the crowd), he said he now realises he was lucky to have gone somewhere where he was seen and listened to, where he felt safe.

Later, he all-but-nailed the adolescent condition. "As a teenager, life is so serious," he told the crowd in the school's sports hall. "Everything matters so much.

If there is any perk to getting older - and there aren't many - one of them is that those serious things still happen to you when you're older, you can still be humiliated, have your heart broken, be embarrassed, but when you're older, at least you know you are going to get over it.

"People are going to forget. And if I could go back and talk to the boy I was, running around in a uniform that was always either too small or too big, never quite right, I would tell him to worry less. Don't worry about things so much.

"When it boils down to it, life is a series of choices and consequences. The trick is to think about the consequences before you make the choice," he added.

As the speeches wound down in the hall, outside a pupil was smacking a hockey ball against a wall. Lads were strolling over to the nearby rugby pitch, tossing around the egg ball. Someone, somewhere, was presumably having a sneaky fag behind the bikesheds. All those futures, just waiting to open up, all passing through.

Graham had referred to secondary school lasting just six years, but noted how "the die has sort of been cast when you leave school. Not in terms of what you'll achieve, or where you end up, or the shape of your life, but your temperament, your moral values, your sense of humour. So who you are when you leave this school is sort of who you are for the rest of your life".

Whoever was doing the teaching 40 or so years ago must have done something right, and evidently, so did the man himself. It all worked out.

Final Mark: A+