So Me (26 page)

It was, and it felt good.

14

Friends in Dry Places

I
ADORE DOLLY PARTON. EVER
since I was a little boy there has been something about her that has drawn me to her. Maybe it’s the bright colours, maybe it’s the music, maybe it’s just a subconscious desire to breastfeed, I don’t know, but I love Dolly.

From the very beginning of
So
I kept asking for the Queen of Country to be on my show. Time and again dates didn’t work out, but then I would see her sitting beside other chat show hosts. I felt like a jilted lover. She was meant to be mine!

Normally I try not to get too personally involved in the booking of guests, but with Dolly it was different. I sent her letters, flowers and rare books about fairies (seriously). Such was my onslaught that the lovely woman took the time to send a personal note of thanks to me along with the promise that she would do her best to do the show. I clung on to the piece of paper which was really just a polite note telling me to fuck off and leave her alone, but to me it was as precious as a scrap of the Turin shroud.

We had a new booker on the show, a man from Ireland called Tony Jordan. We had worked together years before on
The Jack Docherty Show
and I had always been in awe of the dignified patience with which he daily suffered getting
shat on from a great height by publicists and agents whilst simultaneously enduring mountainloads of abuse from us. I really don’t mean to belittle what he does in any way. As I’ve said before, it is by far the hardest job in the business and Tony is the best. Perhaps I didn’t always think so, but when he brought me the news that he had booked Dolly Parton he was a god in my eyes.

The day before the show I was summoned to meet her in her hotel room. By now I had met a lot of celebrities and people I really admired, but I had never been this nervous before. I couldn’t bear it if she didn’t like me, and the sky would fall in if . . . if – it was too horrible to contemplate – if I didn’t like her.

The record label PR man showed me up to her room and I was left alone to wait on an overstuffed sofa. Dolly would be out in a moment. I could hear voices that were getting nearer; soon there was just a door between us; then suddenly it was thrown open and she came dancing into the room singing ‘He’s going to marry me!’, a lyric from the song ‘Marry Me’ that she was going to perform on the show. She twirled around the sofa and collapsed in a fit of giggles on the cushion beside me. Small, shiny and exquisite, she was like a Fabergéegg with tits. Although she is made up of so many elements that are fake and superficial, she exudes a genuine warmth and profound goodness. When you are with her you feel as if nothing bad could happen. Happy and relieved, I wallowed in my love for her.

Dolly was the first guest ever to sing on the show. She burst out of a giant wedding cake and sang ‘Marry Me’ while the audience went mad. Never had I felt less like I was working as we chatted and laughed – it felt like people just
happened to be watching. At the end of the show she was obviously tired and headed back to the hotel to try and get some sleep before flying off to the Grammies the next day. She quickly said goodnight and walked off set. I suddenly had awful doubts – maybe she didn’t like me.

The next few days were strangely flat, not just for me but for everyone in the office. It was as if we were all experiencing a sort of comedown from our Dolly high. The PR people from the record company called to thank us for the show and to tell us how much Dolly had enjoyed herself. They also mentioned the idea of me doing some sort of special with Dolly where I would go to Dollywood, her theme park in Tennessee, and she would show me around. It sounded like a pretty slim premise for a whole show, but we took it to Channel 4 and they bought it. I tried not to get too excited because the chances of Dolly having a break in schedule at the same time as me were pretty slim. I pushed it to the back of my mind.

A producer called Laura Parfitt had worked with me at
Loose Ends
and on various occasions had tried to get me to do something else with Radio 4. I did want to keep up my connection with it, because I saw Radio 4 as a sort of pension plan. If I just hung on, I too could be eighty and still play
Just a Minute
. However, because of TV commitments and a private fear of the posh and educated Radio 4 audience, I had never been able to accept one of Laura’s offers. Finally she came up with a proposal that I found very hard to refuse. We would go to New York for about a week and make a series of programmes about the city in front of a live audience. Each show would be a themed exploration of an aspect of living there, be it death in the city, money, sex or politics.
I would interview a different panel of expert guests on each show and talk to the audience. That is more or less how Laura explained it to me. All I really heard was ‘a week in New York’. Yes please!

Because of my TV schedule we wouldn’t be able to record the shows until early September. Autumn in New York, what could be nicer? We had a wonderful time. The guests were great and the audience were so receptive that it suddenly made me think that maybe I could work in America. Each night after the show we headed into Soho or the Village and sat outside eating dinner and talking about how good life was. We finished recording the last show on 9 September 2001. The series was called
Graham
Norton’s
Big
Apple
Crumble
.

It was never to be broadcast.

The day after we had finished the radio series I flew to Knoxville in Tennessee. Yes, Dolly had found some space in her schedule and our Christmas special from Dollywood was happening. I was thrilled. Although I had never heard of Knoxville before, it is in fact quite a big town, a city if you speak to the locals; however, we weren’t staying there. We were heading for real Dolly Country, a place called Pigeon Forge, home of Dollywood and little else. To call it the middle of nowhere is to make it sound too central. It is really just a highway with a few fast-food joints and the occasional peculiar tourist attraction, like a full-sized concrete dinosaur or a shop selling nothing but Christmas ornaments all the year round.

The other thing about Pigeon Forge, which the same reader who is still using this as a travel book might well want to take note of, is that it is dry. That is to say, you
cannot purchase any alcohol there. But of course, who needs drink or drugs when you are at home to the wondrous madness that is Dollywood? The place is enormous and is part folksy, homespun charm, part Hollywood camp and part fairly basic park rides. Only one woman’s name could rightly sit on top of the gates. The Dolly Museum, the replica of the cottage she grew up in, the Dollywood gift shop, the piped Parton music that plays all over the park all day every day . . . yes, it’s true, the place could make you hate a lesser woman. Somehow, though, Dolly makes you realise that she gets the joke, and also, in a very odd way, although the place is about her, she makes it seem as if it is actually all about the visitors and their enjoyment.

The second morning we were in Pigeon Forge I got up fairly early to go down and meet the film crew for a day’s filming. Because it was off-season the park was closed that day and Dolly wouldn’t be available for filming until the following morning, so it was a good opportunity to film lots of dull set-ups. I started the coffee pot and turned on the TV. There is a daytime show on American television called
Live with Regis and Kelly
, sort of like
This Morning
but with better soft furnishings; however, this particular morning it was late starting because the news was still on covering some stupid story about a light aircraft that had crashed into a building. How annoying. I had my shower.

When I came out of the shower I felt like Bobby Ewing in
Dallas
, except that surely this was the dream. In a few minutes the world had changed. A second plane had flown into the World Trade Center. Unbelievably the news anchor was telling me that they weren’t little planes but full-sized commercial aircraft. I stared at the screen. Could the Twin
Towers be that big? I went downstairs to find the crew and a few other guests standing in the lobby in front of a large television. We all expressed our disbelief about what was happening. My mobile started to ring, people making sure that I wasn’t still in New York. I reassured them and headed off to the Dollywood site.

There is something so special about being in a theme park when it isn’t open to the public. We walked along the pretty winding roads till we found Dolly’s apartment. She has never actually slept in it, but she does use it as a dressing room when she performs shows in the park. The decor suggests that the person who did it knew only two English words and they were ‘pink’ and ‘frilly’. We worked steadily all morning filming various set-ups in the bedroom. One of the guys who worked in the park brought us some batteries we had asked for. He casually told us that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon and that another one might have hit the White House, he wasn’t sure. He ambled off. No one said anything, but if we had we would have all just let out a long slow ‘fuck’. We worked on but were desperate to know more. We pounced on the young man who delivered coffee. ‘Some tower fell down, I think.’ Well, he was obviously mentally subnormal, how could that be possible? By lunchtime Dolly was no longer singing throughout the park. Out of every speaker came news. We sat eating sandwiches listening to a large plastic rock under a bush. It told us the awful news in full.

America was under attack. We couldn’t make any international calls, all flights had been grounded, we were under siege. No one knew where it would end, but we did all feel fairly safe. On the list of terrorist targets we were pretty sure
that Dolly Parton’s theme park in Pigeon Forge ranked quite low. The other odd thing we learned was that we seemed more distressed and shocked by the news than any of the locals. One of our drivers had a cousin who lived in New York, but most people had never even visited the place. It was a real lesson in just how enormous a country the United States of America is. The feeling seemed to be that the good people in Tennessee, at any rate, had always known that New York was a dangerous place and that building things that tall was just an accident waiting to happen.

That night we had been planning to film at another of Pigeon Forge’s attractions, Dolly’s Dixieland Stampede, a cross between a rodeo and dinner theatre, but we assumed that the show would be cancelled. ‘No Sir! We got nearly two thousand people coming to the show tonight!’ And so on the very night of 11 September I was sitting in a huge arena with two thousand proud Americans. The lights dimmed and an announcer welcomed us and told us about the amazing dust-free sawdust that the arena was covered in. Out came the troop of performers on horses, and while they did their tricks a small army of waiters invaded the auditorium, dumping food in front of us like a blanket bombing. Bang, bang, a large brown thing landed on each plate. What was that? Bread perhaps? I stared closer into the darkness. No, that would be a whole chicken. Lovely as it looked I wondered how we were supposed to eat it. The audience looked at one another unsure of what to do, and that was the precise moment when the Master of Ceremonies, sitting on his big white horse, began to sing his haunting melody. I seem to recall that it was called ‘Suppertime’, but what is really etched on my mind for ever is the
bit of the song that went, ‘We don’t need no forks or spoons, we just eat things like raccoons!’ I don’t know what the lyricist charged them for that little couplet, but it was worth every cent when you consider how much it must have saved them on cutlery and washing-up. Then, no sooner had we picked up our chickens than the show moved on to the chicken races. If anything is going to motivate a hen to run fast it must be the smell of cooking chicken. They repeated the trick when they served the next course of pork ribs and the pigs lined up at the starting flag. By the time the ostrich races started I felt very full.

The theme of the show was a contest between the North and the South, and the finale was a huge spectacular about one great nation united beneath one flag. The costumes and horses lit up and vast Stars and Stripes unfurled above the crowd. The people stood and clapped and cheered much as I imagine they did every night, but on that night their strident triumphalism seemed almost touching. These people had such faith in their great country, but as they cheered and clapped their greasy hands, their President was in a bunker. I do love America, but sometimes it can seem like an overgrown baby.

The next day we were filming with Dolly and the park was open. Men and women with the sorts of thighs you don’t see anywhere else in the world waddled around in shorts. Lots of people wore small American flags on their lapels, but that was the only way you might have guessed that not everything was completely normal. The planes seemed to have stopped crashing into things; although we couldn’t leave Pigeon Forge we just got on with our filming, hoping that planes would be flying again by the time we were ready to
head home. We settled into our surreal world and went a bit native. New York did seem very far away, and because we were at the park all day we didn’t get the constant reminders of what had happened there: a grotesque smoking wormhole in the Big Apple.

One of Dolly’s ideas for the show was that we should sing a duet. This was very nice of her, but there was one slight problem: I can’t sing. Some people say this in mock modesty, but I truly cannot. Even when I’m by myself in the bathroom belting out show tunes I am aware that in terms of listening pleasure it’s up there with cats having sex – my singing voice is like an aural fart. Dolly wouldn’t be told. ‘It’ll be cute!’ Jon, who not only knew that I couldn’t sing but is also an accomplished musician in his own right, packed me off to singing lessons. It was decided that we would crucify ‘Islands in the Stream’. My singing teacher, Pepe, was obviously the person you turned to in an emergency; her other clients included the man from the Halifax commercials and the Spice Girls.