So Me (25 page)

‘Here! This is it, stop the car.’

Paula pulled into the side of the road and we all got out. There was a farmhouse with cars outside it about one hundred yards away. We tried not to look too suspicious as we took my father in his temporary plastic home out of the boot of the car.

We went up to the gate, but it really wasn’t how I remembered gates being when I was growing up in the country. This thing was about six feet high. I climbed up and over and Paula passed Dad to me through the railings. My mother, not known for her agility, began the climb. Using some words I never thought I’d hear my mother say aloud, she slowly got herself to the top. Here she stalled. My sister helped her get one leg over and I was there to catch it. Like Annie Oakley astride a very thin metal horse, Rhoda was majestic and triumphant. Now we just needed to get the other leg over. After a couple of tentative attempts, the sudden realisation that she was six feet off the ground with nothing to hold on to hit her. She began to shriek, ‘Get me down! Get me down!’ With very little help from Paula
or myself she quickly transformed into a monkey in a headscarf and headed for firm ground. We paused to get our breath and then Paula noticed something. The huge, insurmountable gate wasn’t actually locked.

Once in the field, we stood together, and the seriousness of what we were doing came back to us. We walked away from the gate till we found a place beneath a tree that had an uninterrupted panorama of the countryside. My mother said a prayer and then unscrewed the lid of the jar. Taking it in turns, we took handfuls of the ashes and scattered them into the wind. We said goodbye and all of us started to cry. Handful after handful we flung the ashes into the air, but there seemed to be no end to the man. Also, the slight breeze had become a bit stronger so that after each throw, we had to dodge the ashes coming back at us. From a distance we must have looked like three people dancing to unheard music in a field. Although we were all still crying, we had also started to laugh – even my mother. It’s one of my happiest memories that day, the three of us dancing around in the sun and the wind, laughing and crying and releasing my father for ever.

We all knew that the first Christmas without Dad was going to be hard, especially for my mother, so I came up with a plan. She would spend Christmas with me in London and then we would head off to San Francisco for New Year. Because I couldn’t drive at the time, trying to choose a place to visit was quite hard. We had to be able get around, but it couldn’t be too hot or too cold and there had to be enough things to interest my mother. At the same time, I wasn’t completely selfless – I wanted a bit of nightlife too. Previously I had taken my mother for long weekends to Seville,
Venice and Paris. These were no-expense-spared affairs and I really enjoyed being able to do it for her. I think Venice was her favourite, though I felt a little awkward. It was such a romantic city and all the other tourists seemed to be in couples, so when I walked into a restaurant with my mother I could sense people looking at us and silently thinking, ‘Christ!
He’s
fucking
her?
’ I never mentioned it to my mother.

I was really looking forward to seeing San Francisco again after so many years and I thought my mother would enjoy it too. My only worry was the hills. Visiting the city requires quite a bit of walking, and when people talk about the ‘hills’, in some cases words like ‘mountain’ or ‘cliff’ would perhaps be a little more accurate. In the event I needn’t have worried about my mother. I had done something to my back trying to sleep on the plane, and I hobbled up the steep slopes while Rhoda the mountain goat scampered along beside me.

Since meeting Carrie Fisher on Ruby Wax’s late-night round-table talk show, we had become good friends. She’d sent me hundreds of emails and we’d forwarded to each other all the filthiest, weirdest stuff that the web had to offer. Carrie lives in Los Angeles, but when she heard that I was visiting San Francisco she began trying to arrange for myself and my mother to visit George Lucas’s Skywalker ranch. This was very sweet and kind of her, but of course it was hard to explain to her that my mother had never seen and barely heard of Star Wars, so for her this ü bertreat would really just be some strange day out. As it happens, Carrie’s kindness was thwarted by the holiday season. It seemed no one was at the ranch. I told her not to worry about it, we were having a great time, and we were.

Alcatraz, the cable cars, Fisherman’s Wharf, we did all
the touristy things. On New Year’s Eve we went to see the wonderful singer Barbara Cook in concert. She has a beautiful voice and has been around for ever, appearing in countless Broadway shows and revues. In terms of gayness, taking your mother to see Barbara Cook in concert on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco sort of takes you off the scale. My mother and I sat with a few hundred gay men beneath an almost visible cloud of cologne and waited for the concert to begin. The lights dimmed, out walked Barbara, much screaming and clapping, and then she opened her mouth to sing. Nothing. She couldn’t remember the words to the song. Then it turned out that she couldn’t remember the words to any songs. She apologised profusely. The audience did a lot of ‘We love you, Barbara’ shouting and the pianist gave her a pep talk. It was every performer’s nightmare actually happening. Barbara somehow managed to get through the show with a great deal of charm, good grace and looking over the pianist’s shoulder.

When we got back to the hotel there was a message from Carrie. ‘You are going to get a call from my friend Sharon Stone inviting you to a brunch.’ This information had barely sunk in when the next message began to play. ‘Hello, this is Sharon Stone.’ Sure enough she was inviting me and my mother to her house for a small New Year’s Day brunch. I went next door to break the news to Rhoda. ‘Oh. Well, you go.’ I knew how she felt. I didn’t particularly want to go either, but I explained that we could not go home and tell people that we had turned down the opportunity to go to Sharon Stone’s house for brunch. And so that is how the next day I found myself looking at my mother in her purple woollen suit standing beside Robin Williams while he did
improv about the recent election. The fixed grin on my mother’s face seemed to suggest that he had not found a new fan in her. Perhaps sensing that he was losing his audience, he picked up someone’s handbag and pretended to make it talk, and then improved off to delight some other brunchers. Sharon, truly a natural beauty, even up close, was charm personified and didn’t even punch my mother when she told her that her new baby’s name, Roan, wasn’t really Irish, just a modern made-up one to sound Irish. I admired the view, the bagels, my feet, the nerve of the woman.

We spent most of the time chatting to what my mother called ‘two very nice girls’ but what anyone one else would have called a couple of bull dykes. We poked around the house as much as we dared. It was beautiful, lots of dark wood and a stunning view out towards Golden Gate Bridge. After a toilet trip that meant we saw a bit more of the house (leopard-skin Ralph Lauren towels slightly suspect), we made our excuses and left.

Back at the hotel my mother rang Paula to tell her all about it. ‘The house was beautiful . . . she was very nice . . . a buffet, I would have done it differently . . . and as for that Robin Williams, well, he didn’t exactly go’ (and here my mother launched into her best Mork impression) ‘“Nanou, nanou” but he might as well have.’ For once my mother and I were in complete agreement. It seems most people talk about Robin Williams in terms of being ‘on great form’ or ‘always hilarious’, but that day at brunch I just wanted to say to him, ‘You’ve won an Oscar, relax, we all know you’re funny.’

Back home the show was going from strength to strength. We were winning more awards and audience figures were growing all the time. Occasionally the press became a bit excited by something that happened. For some reason when we got Mo Mowlam to officiate at a dog wedding, the papers reacted like it was the end of civilisation as we knew it. I felt badly for Mo, because we hadn’t wanted to embarrass her or make her look foolish, it was merely a way of involving the guest in a game where we laughed at little dogs in costumes. Many people wondered why Mo Mowlam had agreed to appear on the show; after all she was a government minister and this was one of the stupidest shows on TV. I’m fairly sure various people strongly advised her not to, but at the end of the day Mo likes having fun and she enjoys being popular. My show was both of those things. Politically it probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do, but that is why people love her – she isn’t very politic. Happily Mo doesn’t blame me for the fall-out and she and her husband Jon have become good friends.

Another item on the show that provoked the wrath of the
Daily Mail
was a visit we made to a website that featured the Pipes of Pam. It was one of those fairly straightforward sex sites that offer live shows via webcam, but this one had the added delights of Pam, who was able to insert a penny whistle into what some people would call her tuppence and play a basic tune. Lulu was the guest and she looked on in fascination, horror and awe as Pam pulled down her panties and gave us a halting, but nonetheless beautiful, rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’. There were complaints, quite a few complaints, in fact several hundred complaints. It was referred to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission. In
the office we were like shame-faced schoolboys who’d been caught shoplifting porn mags. We did sort of feel that things had got out of hand and that perhaps we had pushed the boat out a bit far. But amazingly, when the Commission delivered its conclusion we were off the hook. It was a long, dull report full of legal jargon which essentially said, ‘You were watching
So Graham
Norton
, what did you expect?’

It must be so frustrating to the people who complain that all that really happens is that we sit around the office laughing at them. My favourite one was after we had featured a woman called Madame Pee Pee who did a show involving a brandy glass and bodily fluids. It sounds worse than it was. An irate woman called in and just shouted down the phone, ‘For God’s sake, what is this? I’m supposed to be taping it for the nuns!’ It was only later that we remembered that Daniel O’Donnell was supposed to be the guest that night, but like any good Catholic he had pulled out at the last moment. The thought of groups of nuns and Irish housewives huddled by their television sets watching Madame Pee Pee gave us a warm feeling inside.

Unbelievably, while all of this was going on the BBC were having meetings with me asking me to join the corporation. Part of me was tempted, but I wasn’t ready to quit Channel 4 so soon. They sent me a proposal detailing what shows they would want me to do and how much they would pay me. It was about the same amount of money as I was on at Channel 4. I politely declined and thought no more about it.

My producer Jon and I were off to Japan to make a travel documentary called
Ah-So Graham Norton
where I stayed with a Japanese family and generally experienced all the
weird and wonderful things that Tokyo had to offer. One night we were filming in some obscure part of the city and trying to get something to eat. Eventually we found ourselves sitting around a large, smoking fire pit. Our eyes streamed and our stomachs growled. Small plates of raw food were brought. We cooked little pieces of chicken and vegetables. The more we cooked the hungrier we seemed to get. After what seemed like hours, we had all had about a mouthful of food each. A tray of giant prawns arrived. We put them on the fire. ‘Oh my God!’ We watched aghast as the prawns started to writhe around. Alive and not having a good time, they waved their little claws at us. It was late and we were tired and hungry. Even the vegetarians amongst us began to laugh.

Somewhere towards the end of what we were reluctantly calling our dinner, the production mobile phone rang and one of the crew went outside to answer it. They came back in and handed it to me.

‘It’s your agent, Melanie.’

I took the phone out into the street. Across the continents I could sense her breathless excitement.

‘I’ve been trying to reach you all day!’

‘I’ve been filming,’ I said, hungry and slightly irritable, ‘what’s so urgent?’

‘The BBC have come back with another offer.’

Now I was really annoyed. We had been through all of this, I didn’t want to go.

‘They are offering you five million pounds.’ I nearly vomited badly cooked prawn.

I stood holding the phone not saying anything. Tokyo pushed by me and signs I couldn’t read flashed above my
head. Five million pounds! Obviously I was tempted, who wouldn’t be? But then I thought about it more clearly. The money had changed, but the rest of the offer was exactly the same and it was an offer I had found very easy to turn down only a week before. I was already earning more money than I ever dreamt I would. I had no children, not even a dog to worry about it.

‘No,’ I said.

Melanie, sounding more serious than I had ever heard her, asked me if I was sure.

‘Yes.’

I hung up the phone and walked back into the smoking fire pit. I was in shock. Was it possible that I, Graham Walker, from Bandon, Co. Cork, had just walked away from five million pounds?