So Me (29 page)

I was only doing the show in New York for three weeks, so I’m not really sure why I felt the need to buy a house there. I was sitting at home in Bow when the post arrived. Amongst the offers of free credit cards was a catalogue from Sotheby’s. I wondered why they had sent it to me – looking at the front cover, it seemed to be about a sale of Impressionist art. I hardly
felt like their target audience. While I had my morning coffee I casually flicked through it, and there at the back were some advertisements for Sotheby’s real estate. A picture of a house in New York caught my eye. It was a small carriage house in a private mews and it just looked like paradise. I took the picture into work and left it on my desk like a property version of a pin-up. Simply looking at it made me happy. Jon saw it.

‘Are you going to buy that?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I answered a bit too quickly.

‘You can afford it. If I had your money that’s exactly what I’d do.’

The seed had been planted. I suppose I could just about afford it, and . . . and, well, I wanted it. Again I tried to dress it up as an investment, blah, blah, blah, but really it was just shopping with a capital S. I flew to New York to see it, which meant that the various estate agents smelt cash. I was driven around town in limousines and shown amazing lofts and apartments, but in the end, like in Cape Town, I just wanted the one in the picture.

It turned out it belonged to Claudia Schiffer and she had just had it gut-renovated. Part of the deal was that I would buy all the furniture she had just put in it. It wasn’t exactly what I would have chosen, but it meant I could move right in. When I came to do my stand-up a few months later I didn’t need a hotel, I had my own little house in the heart of Manhattan, right by the entrance to the mid-town tunnel where twenty years before I had been driven in a bus, blinking at the brilliance of the city.

Claudia had moved out but I did find quite a few of her personal effects lying around – mostly make-up and toiletries
. Every night in the stand-up show I gave away a different item that had belonged to Claudia Schiffer. Someone on the last night walked away with the supermodel’s ladyshave. I’m sure to this day they think I was making it up and don’t realise the value of the DNA on those little blades.

As in my gigs in Edinburgh, part of the show involved a random phone call, but I found that the personal ads in the New York gay magazines didn’t tend to have home phone numbers and if they did they were always connected to an answering machine. I didn’t know what to do. One night I was in a mid-town bar called Stellas. This sounds hopelessly naïve of me, but I just thought it was frequented by a very mixed friendly crowd. It took me about an hour to figure what the combination of elderly gay gentlemen, attractive Puerto Rican boys and a cash machine in the bar might mean. One of the boys came over to me and started to talk. His name was Sammy and he was very funny. On a whim I explained what I was doing in New York, and while he was very sexy I didn’t really want to sleep with him, but would he be in the following night for me to call him from the show? I said I’d pay him. This all sounds very straightforward and almost logical in the retelling, but always remember that when I am telling any story that involves a bar and boys, it is a given that I was pissed out of my mind.

The next morning I found his number and even remembered why he had given it to me. That night, I explained to the audience who Sammy was and how we had met and that I was going to phone him. I half expected him not to be there, but he was. Sammy was a natural. He told a very funny story about going back with some guy who on the way to his hotel kept saying, ‘I hope my friend likes you.’
Sammy just assumed it was going to be a Cybill sandwich, but so long as they were paying, who cared? Once inside the room he saw a miniature picket fence set up on the carpet and there inside the makeshift pen was the guy’s ‘friend’. A small hen. Not just any hen, however. This was showbiz poultry. The hen had appeared in
Babe: Pig in the
City
, and the man was looking after it for its owner. Perhaps it was in the city for a round of auditions? While he sucked Sammy’s penis he had to keep shuffling around the floor on his knees to make sure that the chicken was looking at him at all times. Never had a hen seemed so uninterested in a cock.

Night after night I phoned Sammy and he was brilliant. He always began with a new topical joke and then told his chicken story, and if that went really well, I’d encourage him to tell another story about pissing in a bottle for some man who wanted to drink it. Every couple of nights I’d go and find him in whatever bar he happened to be in, often working as a go-go dancer, and I would shove dollars of thanks down his pants. It was the perfect arrangement. Sammy knew that I had a show in Britain, but he didn’t really know what it was. As far as he was concerned I was just some guy who phoned him up and then gave him money. I knew that later on I would simply be the subject of another story along with the chicken guy.

One night, BBC America, along with
Vanity Fair
, had a party for me at the Whiskey Bar in the basement of the Times Square W Hotel. I was asked whom I would like to invite. I immediately said Sammy, partly because I felt I owed him that much and partly because I knew what a kick he would get out of it.

The Whiskey Bar of the W Hotel is exactly how you’d imagine it to be: dark and stylish and populated by stylish people in dark clothes. Models and actors-in-waiting handed around trays of tiny canapés and glasses of champagne. BBC America had set up a huge screen which was showing clips from my TV show on a loop. The
Vanity Fair
people, who, if their laugh-free reaction was anything to go by, had, I think, hated the show, came up to me one by one to offer me a pale, damp hand of congratulations.

‘Oh,’ they simpered, ‘where’s Sammy?’

‘Over there. Do you want to meet him?’

I’m guessing none of them really did but they had no real choice. I loved watching the malnourished media stick insects trying to make conversation with a hustler who had been sucked off in front of a chicken.

At one point I glanced over at Sammy and he was staring at the screen. Of course I don’t know for certain what was going through his head, but I imagine that he must have been thinking, ‘All this fuss over Graham and all he’s doing is talking. I can talk. I’m funny.’ There is no doubt that Sammy could do what I do standing on his head, and suddenly I thought about the life choices he had made and the ones I had. What if that day in San Francisco twenty years earlier had gone differently? What if I hadn’t said, ‘Stop’? Perhaps it was a very patronising thing to think, but I began to feel badly for letting Sammy have this glimpse through the ‘what if’ window. He had been perfectly happy before I came into his life, and now I could tell I had subtly made him dissatisfied with his lot.

Eventually Sammy and I did sleep together. I didn’t pay, but I’m fairly sure it was a thank-you bonus shag for all the
money I’d given for the phone calls. Certainly he treated me as a client. It was odd to be in bed with someone who was totally there for you. It’s one of those things that sounds like it should be great, but actually it’s not. You know that they can’t really be that into you, and so it’s hard to enjoy their insincere attentions. Maybe it feels all right if you’re paying because then at least you know why they’re being the way they are.

Back in London a small army of people were preparing to go five nights a week for
V Graham Norton
. Vast offices had been rented near to the studios on the South Bank, and an enormous portrait of me dressed as Napoleon that had been done for the Comedy Awards one year covered a whole wall in reception. Graham Stuart thought it was funny, and the money he had paid for it went to Comic Relief, so I couldn’t really complain. Jon was now a sort of überproducer, overseeing everything while three new producers took over responsibility for the day-to-day running of the shows. Beneath them were a couple of associate producers and beneath them three or four researchers and then various runners and production co-ordinators. The first time I walked in and saw the acres of desks was very daunting. All these people working all day every day just so I could sit on a chair and talk. Surely we should at least be trying to find a cure for some serious disease? As I peered across the rows of heads staring at computer screens, I did feel a bit like the tubby tyrant Mr Bonaparte. Was five nights a week going to be my Russian winter?

Most new shows are plagued by all sorts of teething problems, but because this was really just a broken-up version of the old programme we sort of hit the ground running. I
loved my new life doing a show every night of the week. I was still driving into work every day so that I couldn’t drink after the show, I went to the gym three mornings a week – I felt great.

Originally the plan had been to have a diverse mix of guests because there was no way of having celebrities every night. I imagined having authors and journalists sharing the limelight with the more obvious guest line-up, but we quickly found that it was possible to have someone the audience was pleased to see every night. Obviously some nights were less starry than others, but I can say hand on heart that I never brought someone down those stairs that I was embarrassed by. Even when bookings fell through on the day, I still said no to suggestions of guests that I felt weren’t good enough. My standard line to the poor beleaguered Tony on those bleak days was, ‘I’d rather interview the cushion on the chair.’

Because we were on right after the huge Channel 4 hit
Big
Brother
, often my monologue at the top of the show would be about what had just happened on the reality TV programme. It was a particularly strong year in the house that year of 2002, and it was easy to make fun of the various people on the show. Jade emerged early on as the biggest personality, and much has been made by journalists about how I was horrible and then nice about her. It is at times like that when I pity journalists most, when they have to dream up some hidden agenda behind something that was very straightforward. At the beginning of
Big Brother
I found her wildly annoying, but then, as the weeks went by, I became fond of her. I had done the unthinkable for a journalist – I had changed my mind.

The night before the end of
Big Brother
we did one of my very favourite shows. Dustin Hoffman was the guest, and although I was by now very comfortable meeting big female stars, I was quietly dreading him: somehow it made sense that as a gay man I should get along with all the divas, but in my head Dustin Hoffman was a deeply serious actor who would loathe my silly little show. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Dustin wandered into make-up and immediately started talking to me about the show. He knew it well because his kids watched it all the time on BBC America; in fact he had agreed to come on in order to please them. He was wildly complimentary to me and then gave me some advice about not playing the monologue straight down the camera too much. I often say that I will go to my grave a failed actor rather than a successful anything else, and here I was getting performance notes from a man who is without doubt one of the greatest living actors on the planet.

When I introduced him he bounded on to the set more like a stand-up than some self-obsessed, classically trained actor. He told stories about celebrities, he kept referring to the audience, he said hello to various people he had met during the day. One of the items on the show involved us reuniting Dustin with a cab driver that he had made a fuss of at an awards show several years earlier. Dustin was genuinely delighted to see the guy again. I don’t think I have ever seen a man who enjoyed his fame more. He doesn’t revel in it like some half-baked diva, he just understands what profound but simple pleasure he can bring to people just by saying hello, signing an autograph, or posing for a photograph.

It has been interesting over the years to see how the various stars treat their fans. People like Neil Diamond, and
especially Donny Osmond, couldn’t be nicer to their fans whereas David Cassidy seemed downright rude and dismissive of his. He resented his fans for loving his seventies persona because it meant he couldn’t move on. What he wants to move on to I have no idea. The great new album that he wanted to plug was just a collection of cover versions of other people’s hits, and yet he deeply resented being asked to perform his own songs. He very reluctantly agreed to perform ‘I Think I Love You’ on the show, and when he did he made fun of it. His fans looked on not understanding why their hero seemed to hate the very song that they loved him for. Donny Osmond understands that you’ve got to respect the treasured memories that every fan brings to each song. I have huge admiration and respect for him, which is odd because when I was a kid it was David Cassidy I thought about as I karate-chopped away.

The end of the Dustin Hoffman show was a sketch where he, Betty and myself played various characters from the
Big
Brother
house. Johnny the fireman, who was from Newcastle, was going to be played by Dustin. As we all clambered into our costumes backstage I could hear Jon giving him a crash course in a Geordie accent. Like the professional he is, Dustin listened quietly and then went on and stole the show.

The next night I was down at the Big Brother house for the finale. The idea was that I would meet Jade and ask her to come on the show. Looking back I don’t know what possessed me to do this, but at the time it seemed really important. The evening was pretty hideous to be honest, but I loved seeing first-hand the expression on Johnny’s face when they showed him the clip of Dustin Hoffman playing him. Ten weeks before he had just been another Geordie
fireman with an outgoing personality, and now a true Hollywood giant was pretending to be him. It was one of the most surreal bits of television I have ever seen.

The next week Jade was a guest on the show every night, and it was like an educational film on the perils of fame. On the Monday she was the sweet gormless girl we had got to know on
Big
Brother
, but night after night she became more and more difficult and divaish. I don’t blame her, I blame the PR people and agents she was surrounded by who were pumping her full of shit, but then I don’t really blame them either because they were just doing their job. Celebrity, when it is based on a special skill or talent, is one thing, but the sort of fame reality TV stars achieve is so groundless that the only way it can exist is if it is constantly propped up by people telling you that you are worthy of the attention, that you do deserve your celebrity.