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.”
I am talking to him remotely, but Norton lights up a Zoom call. He has a lovely, relaxed, sunny disposition; he turned 60 in April and looks as if he has the regrets of a man half his age, or maybe no regrets at all. But he has drifted into choppy waters with Queen of the Universe: since it launched in December 2021, the world has changed. In the US, states are passing laws against drag in what – taken together with the Roe v Wade catastrophe and book bans in school libraries – is probably the most alarming slide into authoritarianism since the McCarthy era. In the UK, a drag culture older than panto has been recast by anti-transgender extremists as some kind of entry-level child-grooming.
A cultural form that has always been about fun, flamboyance and play is under sustained attack, yet we are having a conversation that, to my mind, is so avoidant as to be almost wilful.
“The success of Drag Race has made drag much more popular,” Norton says, “but it’s also raised the bar so ridiculously. Back in the day, when I worked in restaurants, we’d go to gay bars and there would be a drag act at the end of the night, and I’m pretty sure most of them had just one dress, one wig. They wandered out, did a few jokes, maybe sang a song, messed with the audience. And we were delighted. That was good enough. Now, they need to have costume reveals, they need to do death drops. That comes from that American tradition – that thing of serving looks. UK drag is so firmly based in comedy, right?”
Right, yes, and also there’s quite a lot going on at the moment that is neither funny nor a look? You wouldn’t have to live in India to feel under threat as a drag queen in 2023: you could live in Tennessee.
“It must be terrifying,” he concedes. “You’re so vulnerable anyway, because you’re so obvious. Which one’s the drag queen? There are no dressing rooms in bars or anything – they have to get ready at home. And then they either walk to the bar or get an Uber; in New York that’s fine, but there must be places now where that’s not such a comfortable thing to do.”
But as much as I try to drag Norton under, he keeps bobbing back to the surface, suggesting that the anti-drag movement has a positive side. “It’s so ridiculous that I think that bit of the right wing have sort of overestimated how thick people are. I think people are gonna go: ‘Oh, wait a minute. So everything you say is bullshit?’ Because clearly we are not facing a threat from drag queens. It’s just a form of entertainment. It’s older than God.”
Norton doesn’t like to be dragged into politics, and yet that doesn’t stop us all trying; asked last year at a literary festival about JK Rowling and cancel culture, he counselled against asking “a bloke on the telly”, instead suggesting: “Talk to trans people, talk to the parents of trans kids.” He got a torrent of abuse for that and had to leave Twitter, but it was a good distillation of his stance, not so much about LGBTQ+ matters, but about his place in the conversation and, indeed, the world. He is showbiz. He is not here to start a fight; he is here to have a laugh. “Your job is to entertain people and to either make people forget other awfulness or to make them believe that things aren’t as awful as they thought they were,” he says. “Maybe that’s where my positivity comes from. Or maybe I’m in this world because I have that view. I don’t know.”
Norton was born in Clondalkin, now a suburb of Dublin, although his family moved a lot. He had lived in 13 different houses by the time he left home, not just because his dad was a sales rep for Guinness, but also because his parents really liked moving. “I was a very effeminate little boy,” he says. “I was kind of aware of it. I knew that was my job, not to get bullied. Because it was so obvious. I remember my parents sending this little fey thing – I wore my sister’s clothes, I still wet the bed – off to primary school, aged four. They must have thought, ‘What’s going to come back? Some blood on a stick? This is all that remains.’”
He speaks highly of his parents – his mother is still alive, at 91 – and their subtlety and tact, the way they never tried to stop him being who he was, out and about in the street in girls’ clothes (“I quite literally grew out of it”). “I think they knew that if they tried to stop me, it would become a thing,” he says. “These were Irish parents in the 60s. In a small town in Ireland, I think that was kind of radical that they didn’t fight any of it. They let me fly my freak flag.”
If his enduring memories of his family are of love and acceptance, he still felt stifled by sleepy, small-town life, and only began to feel any affection for the place much later. “When my father was ill and dying, and when he died, that was when I started to appreciate lots of Irish qualities that I hadn’t appreciated, or I’d dismissed and actively disliked when I was growing up. That sense of community, that idea of people being involved in other people’s lives, I hated all of that. As an adult in that situation, I just found it so beautiful. I thought it was gorgeous.”
He went to University College Cork, dropped out after two years, and fetched up in London, working in restaurants from 1984, later going to the Central School of Speech and Drama. “I was talking to a friend last night; we met when we worked in restaurants. She claims that I said in 1985 that my dream was to be a chatshow host. I don’t remember saying that.”
So you manifested your destiny, and then forgot, I say.
“And that’s why my book about manifesting hasn’t done well.”
It was while he was at Central that he was the victim of a horrifically violent mugging. He has described this as a turning point, giving him the sense of perspective and of life’s inherent absurdity that drove his work as a standup. By 1992, he was at the Edinburgh festival, with a controversial routine in which he sent up Mother Teresa. This is sometimes referred to as a drag act, but seriously, there wasn’t much more to his outfit than a tea towel, which I guess underlines his point that drag used not to have standards.
The way he remembers it, all his wildest dreams were realised the first time he could pay his rent just by doing standup. “That was it, for child-me; that was as far as he was going to go.” Back then, on the standup circuit, he says: “I was the gay one: Julian Clary had left the circuit by then, he was a telly star. So there were three of us: me, Bert Tyler-Moore – he writes The Windsors now – and Scott Capurro, who had come over from America. And I think that was it. There were a few lesbians, Rhona Cameron and Donna McPhail. And that was our thing.”
He reckons he wasn’t any good. “I was always much happier as a compere; I was never comfortable being the turn. Some comperes aren’t good, and the acts hate you because it’s hard to follow someone who has just gone on and died. No one thought I was a good comic; no one thought my act was any good. But I did get some respect as a compere.”
I saw him then as a turn, and he was really funny. I remember his gaydar being way off: he thought an obviously straight guy in the audience was definitely gay, and two gay guys were Millwall supporters (they had skinheads and a staffie). In fact, I thought that was his thing: the gay comedian with no gaydar.
I don’t tell him all that. I just tell him I disagree: I thought he was really funny. “I guess I got bored. I remember, I’d be on stage, and I would feel the word ‘gay’ in my mouth. I’d think, Oh God, I’m gonna say ‘gay’ again. I guess if you only saw me once, it probably wasn’t that bad. But I was doing it every night.”
This became, via all those comedy waypoints of the olden days – the Edinburgh festival, Radio 4’s Loose Ends, etc – a show of his own on Channel 4, So Graham Norton, from 1998. He had wanted something Wednesday-evening-ish, chatshowy. Instead, they gave him the Eurotrash spot on a Friday night, for “people who have either been sat at home having a drink or come home after work drinks. That’s when the show became as out there and rude as it was, because we felt that was our remit. It was a very sexually frank show. It wasn’t uncomfortable – I loved Eurotrash, it was never awkward for me. But because we came in strong, came in like a wrecking ball, we ran out of road quite soon. Because, you know, there are limits. Unless we were going to have people full-on shagging on the carpet, we had to get out of it.”
If he sees one of those shows now, on a Facebook memory or whatnot, he can’t watch it. “I find them so hard. I guess maybe I’m a prude now. I just think: ‘How was that ever on television?’ But it was!”
It was groundbreaking for two reasons – first, obviously, Norton’s jokes. “The innuendoes were the same: it was just Round the Horne. But being openly gay turns them into something different.”
Also, the audience were completely filthy as well, and that wasn’t about inclusivity and LGBTQ+ – it was like a geyser of suppressed everything exploding. “It became mainstream, and mainstream telly changed. I think there was a time when mainstream telly was like you were visiting your granny: you couldn’t swear, you couldn’t do this or that. And we were very aware that, actually, that’s not who people are.”
So it is a paradox that material he was happy about at a time when it was genuinely eye-popping, he now finds unwatchable even while the mainstream has changed to accommodate it. But I get it; you are so hungry when you are young that you will say anything.
So Graham Norton ended in 2002, and by this time his career at the BBC and full ascension into The Face Welcome in Every Home had begun: Norton was the face of Comic Relief, of Strictly Dance Fever, of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? and its surprising number of spin-offs. If everyone liked it, nobody could be offended by it, but it wasn’t boring: this is a devilishly hard formula to pull off, and Norton, with his risque reputation but fundamentally warm, amiable bearing, is one of few people who could front it. The Graham Norton Show started in 2007 and is still running.
If this 21st-century incarnation – legit, prime-time chatshow host – is what he wanted all along, he didn’t originally want to host Eurovision, and turned it down at first. “I didn’t need to do it, and I didn’t want to not do the commentary. And then I just thought: ‘What if I’m up in my little rabbit hutch, looking down at another presenter doing it?’, so I did say ‘yes’, and I’m so glad I did. It’s the gig of a lifetime.”
Norton is writing a fifth novel. “My books are quite quiet,” he says. “They’re not exciting. One of the things I like about that bit of my life is I didn’t start it till I was 50. I loved waking up at 52 being a debut something. It was a good reminder that there’s more road than we think. I have just turned 60; my mum is 91. That’s 30 years. It’s a long time to coast. Starting the writing just reminded me, you’re not dead yet.”
Oh, and one more thing to embark on at a relatively late age: last year, he married Jonathan McLeod, a film-maker. “I had a joke in my speech: the vows are much more manageable. ‘Till death do us part’ seems more achievable at our age. If you get married at 23, that’s a big ask. We only have to put up with each other for a couple of decades. And then I’ll be out of here.” About death, like life, he’s always looking for the upside.
Season two of Queen of the Universe is available to stream now on Paramount+
