Graham Norton

so funny. I like dog interruptions very much. It seemed quite disrespectful. I think that's entirely in keeping with like dogs. Hello, I'm Mini Driver. Welcome to Many Questions Season two. I've always loved Pruce's Questionnaire. It was originally a nineteenth century parlor game where players would ask each other thirty five questions aimed at revealing the other players true nature. It's

just the scientific method really. In asking different people the same set of questions, you can make observations about which truths appeared to me universal. I love this discipline, and it made me wonder, what if these questions were just the jumping off point. What greater depths would be revealed if I ask these questions as conversation starters with thought

leaders and trailblazers across all these different disciplines. So I adapted Pru's questionnaire and I wrote my own seven questions that I personally think a pertinent to a person's story. They are when and where were you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped

you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that's grown out of a personal disaster. And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and humbled to have had the chance to engage with. You may not hear their answers to all seven of these questions. We've whittled it down to which questions felt closest to their experience or the most surprising, or created the most

fertile ground to connect. My guest today is the polymorphous wonder that is Graham Norton. Graham is perhaps best known for his chat show The Graham Norton Show, for the eight books he has written, for the radio shows he presents in the UK, and on and on and on, because the thing for me that makes him so known is this extraordinary wit and spirit that just runs through every single thing he does. I can't tell you how many times I've been on his show over the years,

but it's quite a few. And I will tell you that churches can really be a bit uphill, but I long to go on his show because I have never laughed so much in my life. After you've listened to this episode of my podcast, please just google Funny race Hall names the Graham Norton Show, and you will see me genuinely crying with laughter at the hands of a merciless Graham. It's quite hard to become a national treasure in the UK, but Graham is one, and everyone knows it.

I always feel better for having talked to him, and this interview right now proved to be no different at all. Where and when were you happiest? I do know this, but I always kind of think, I remember when I was a kid, there was a Peanuts cartoon. I loved Peanuts when I was a kid, but it's kind of

weirdly deep for kids. I think it's Charlie Brown and Lucy maybe talking Charlie Brown, someone else talking, somebody saying, you know, in every life, one day will be happier than all the other days, and the other little child is going yes, and then the first child goes, what if you've had it? And as a child, you know, that sort of blew me away because that's just seemed the saddest thing in the world that if you're eleven and you've had your happiest day, the rest of your

life is it lived out? Not as good as that. So I think you've got to live your life assuming your happiest days to come. I think that's very smart. Oh my god, it's so existential Peanuts, isn't it. Yeah, that is so deep for a little children's cartoon, And it hit me to my core. That just seemed like meaning of life, level of revelation. Happiest day might have happened. The answer to your question is I had a wedding weekend this summer in Ireland. Your wedding, my wedding is

my wedding. We got married already, but we had this weekend and you know, there were party planners, and there was this going to happen, This is going to happen. People were flying in, but of course then the airports were all messed up, COVID was still around. You know. I picked these party planners basically out of the phone book. So they're telling me, oh, yeah, we'll do this, and you're thinking, I hope you do, because I have no idea. Anyway,

the weekend could not have gone better. We got amazing whether the moment I was happiest was with my husband, just as the party was drawing to the close on the Sunday, where you know, we were surrounded by our friends. Still, it was a beautiful night. The lights were all in the trees, the music was playing, and it was just I didn't need to worry about how the whole weekend was going to go anymore. I didn't need to worry about the catering, or the performers, or the weather or

people getting there. In that little probably fifteen minute, you know, at the end, I could just be happy. In that little tail end of all the anxiousness and the planning, I felt supremely content and loved and loving and all all those good things and all the anxiety and the worry actually qualifies and probably has a huge amount to do with how happy you felt. Yes, actually, you're absolutely right. It is a correlation. All the things that could have

gone wrong didn't. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if there are people who when they die, I feel that they shually went all the stuff is done. It's like, oh, phew, you know, I'm night, and God, I don't have to do another Christmas. On a different level, I see that with people on my chat show all the time. What do you mean at the very end they're really happy, Well, they're kind of very happy, but also disappointed because they

were worried for the whole show. Sometimes I'll have, you know, a newbe someone who's just doing their first movie or their first single or whatever, and because I'm such an old blag, I've been sat there for donkeys years and suddenly, really, oh, you're really nervous, you know you kind of you just want to hug them and kind of go, oh, really, you shouldn't be nervous about this. Trust me, so many words things are going to happen to you. This is not one of them. This is one of the good things.

Trust me, nebe this highlight and I feel they were worried for the whole show that was going to go wrong, and they're going to say something stupid, or I was going to ask them a weird question, or I was going to make them look foolish, and then you see them at the end kind of going, oh, I could have just enjoyed that. I could have just let go and enjoy that. And I wonder if people think that

on their deathbed, like, oh, I was such a fool. Well, I worried about stains on my carpet when I could have just been enjoying the coffee that I spilt on it. You know, it's just that kind of approach to life when someone who you've loved has died, has that thing become really really present for you, of oh my god, I'm really am going to let go of worrying about all of that stuff because I've just seen how quickly

this is over. Like there's a clarifying moment. I felt that when Mom died so extraordinarily like, holy shit, I am never thinking about that thing again. That probably lasted for a minute. Yes, I agree with you. I think grief and loss gives you exactly that word, the clarity it gives you perspective, it goes again. I'm a years ago, in my twenty I got mugged and stabbed and kind of lost over half my blood and ended up in hospital.

But I remember when I was in hospital, and maybe it was just the drugs I was on or something, I don't know, but I just remembered feeling like I knew everything. I felt like in that moment, having survived that, I felt like I could have you know, Palestine, Israel, come sit by my bed. I will. I'll solve this

because I have this kind of huge wisdom. Like I said, it was probably the drugs, but equally, I do think there's something about extreme things like that, like grief, like loss for a moment, as you say, like the window shuts again. In that moment, you know everything, but you remember this is so show biz. But remember when Kim Catrall and Sarahisca Parker had the fuck Yeah, I remember

that burned into my memory. Serage Parker said something to about the brother yea, about her brother and Kim, you were not my friend, and everyone's like, oh, that's been harsh, and I just thought, no, that's a woman in grief totally, that's a woman in grief going, oh, you know what, you fuck right out of this. Yes, it's the clarifier you chop out the people that try to co opt your brother's death for a tweet or whatever it was. You respond with that clarity of emotion of like, I

have no time for this extraneous social contract bullshit nonsense. Yeah, but I also feel like that does maybe just what we said about the anxiety qualifying the happiness those moments and that kind of intensity. When I remember it, I feel the happiness on the other side of it. I feel how it helped throw into relief what real happiness

looked like. That sitting on that beach in Cornwall in the rain, when we all complained about the barbecue not lighting, and my mom laughed because she had cring tonics in funny enough, a snoopy, you know, small child's drink holder. All that happiness, it's just more clearly defined by all that worry or anxiety or angst around certain things. And I'm I'm kind of fascinated by that. But that is part of I suppose the fundamental duality of being alive.

It is, but also I think an extreme thing like that, you know, all that whanging on, living in the moment, whanging on. But you know what I mean, because it's like all that whanging on and living at the moment, I totally do. So, yes, we know, we all are to live in the moment. Yeah, yeah, Well, you know what, I've got a diary and there's things in it and

I'm planning. You know, you just can't. But in that moment, in that profound moment of loss, you are entirely in that moment, I think, where nothing else is going on. It's just that. Yeah, every book that I'd read on any kind of personal growth or philosophy or religion or whatever I've read in my whole life, it was so extraordinary in those moments. And by moments, I mean months after Mom died. It's like I knew, I knew, just

as you said, weirdly, I knew everything. I knew all of the thing, all of the things that mattered, all the things that actually held meaning, all of the things that I wanted to let go of. It was so incredibly clear. There's an extraordinary gift in that. There's not much that's good about when your mom dies. And I would only say that just in terms of like observing stuff that happens. But I do believe in the clarifying

power of grief and the definition of happiness. I want to see Gary Barlow from Take That, who if people in America they may not know Take That. But he was a you know, a young kid and a boy band and then they disapparited a horrible time and they came back and were successful. And he's doing this one man show kind of a life and in the second act he tells this really heartbreaking story about him and

his wife losing a baby. The baby is still born, and it's so heartbreaking, it's very sad, everyone in the audience sobbing. But he turns it into this positive. The gift that that child gave him was perspective, and the gift of that child gave him was being able to say no to things, not you know, needing to please people all the time. And that what you're talking about, the happiness on the other side of something. I just think that's what's that phrase, collateral beauty around awful things?

There is collateral beauty? Really tell me what relationship, real

or fictionalized, defines love for you? Oh, now it's fictional, but it was profound when I watched it, and it's still kind of profound because I think there's a kind of a pureity to the love in this and it's Elliott and et the love between those two, because so much of it's unspoken, so much of it isn't thought about or expressed or figured out, or you know, the way in relationships there's a kind of a not a game, but a kind of a dance, is sort of a

choreograph thing between you before you get to love and staying in love. And there's something so pure about the love between that little boy and the alien, and the fact that you know one of them is an alien makes it really lovely. And his heart lights up like a bedside lamp. You can't get better than that. I mean, I love John. Oh, but if his heart lit up like a bedside lamb, but I could read by it, I would love it. If my boyfriend's he lit up like I'd be like, oh God, keep that going. I

can turn my phone off. I'll just turn this way downing hard on. Yeah, that's lovely, so like a camp fire. Oh. Also, you know what's beautiful about Elliot and Eats relationship as well, is that Elliott his love doesn't weive when he knows has got to go. Yeah, he doesn't sort of stop

helping him, and it doesn't diminish the love. That notion that one person is going to really lose out because I don't think it would really think twice about Elliott after he's gone back home, frankly, because home is obviously his passion and what defines love for him. It's all he talks about when he does staying. But also, isn't there something about that? Because Et nearly dies, so Elliott thinks he's lost Et, and then he comes back to life, and then I think that allows Elliott to let him

go because it's so lovely that he's alive. I don't care if you're alive and not living with me, but I'm so happy you're alive. You're absolutely right, it's a really beautiful, pure expression of unconditional love that relationship. I think you should stop asking this question now because I think I've given the proper answer. I think I've've solved that question for you. I've solved for that across it off. Yeah,

it's Eliot and e t thank you, thank you, good night. Okay, So what is the quality that you like least about yourself. Compromise is a good thing, but I feel I'm a pushover. I feel like I never really stand up for anything. I kind of just go, ho, well, I just roll over. There's a lot of rolling over, and I feel like that's the thing the young me would judge me the

most harshly about. I think the young me would be pleased that I was success and but I think the young me would stare at me, going, what you're going to do that? Or you know what? That's okay? Isn't that like, you know, path of least resistance. Isn't that like a whole kind of philosophy in itself? Isn't that a really amazing thing that you do that? No, see, I don't think it's admirable at all. I look at people with conviction, and I am in all of them. They are annoying, but I am in all of them.

That's really interesting. It happens in my personal life to where you know, like there's a lot of inner monologue about that shouldn't happen or that, but I just don't say anything because it's it's easier, but it's not easier. But I think it is easier. It's easy because it's like the thing is that once you've done it once and you realize the whole world didn't stop and this guy didn't fall in and it was actually fine, I think it must then become quite a delicious thing to do,

which is to maybe not take a position. It takes a lot of energy to have conviction. It does. And like I said, I am in all of those people. You know, I feel like, you know that thing kind of like, oh that was quite good, that's fine, that's all right, And you've gotta think, oh, why can't something be exceptional? Why can't something be really good? And I feel like I should aim a bit higher in all parts of my life. But I don't find Jannah notice about you? Oh no, no, he's my doing well, yeah,

he's my peak achievement. My husband is my peak achievement. I think that's lovely. I do know what you mean. But I'm just the complete opposite. I need to stop trying to fight for everything and just getting exhausted and disappointed as opposed to being pleasantly surprised when a few things work out. There must be something in between, where you know what battles are worth fighting. My boyfriends were really good at that. He's like, I'm not going to die on that hill. I am going to die on

that one. Except I'm not going to die. I'm going to succeed. I'm going to plant my flag in the top of that mountain and then he'll do it. It's quite annoying. So maybe actually my worst quality is that I'm just resentful of his good quality, of his good qualities. My friends just moved into a new apartment and they're having trouble with the neighbor. There's an upstairs neighbor. All these like angry emails going around, and my friend ended one email with do not fight me, I will win.

Oh my god, that's fantastic. I love that way to win over your neighbors. Do not fight me, I will win. Also, that is a rookie era never moving anywhere with upstairs neighbors. It's hard. I mean, one a nightmare for cool thing, but stairs neighbors are terrible to neighbors. Essentially, basically being in a neighbor sandwich is fucking dreadful. Yeah, I don't know I would take that into extreme consideration, but have

a whole neighbor thing nightmare. I used to do like an agony uncle column in a paper here, and I did it for about eight years. And those are the problems I dreaded when people wrote in about the neighbors, because there is no solution. There's no solution except move, yeah, move at Even then it's hard because if they're noisy or whatever, it's hard to sell your house and blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah, you have to disclose all

of that stuff. Yeah, it's monsters. As if it weren't hard enough trying to find a place to rent or buy in this life. Now, what question would you most like answered? I remember, and I'm sure all kids do this, where you lie in the grass and look up and you know the clouds move, but you think that's the earth going and then you look beyond that into the blue and it's just that. Even as an adult you stop thinking about it. But as a child, that is such a kind of mind fuck. There must be a

there there, but there is no there there. It goes on forever, new they can't go on forever. There has to be you know. I still don't understand it. But do I want that question answered? I mean no, because I think it would bore the chasses out of me. I think just like someone would start explaining to me are placed in the cosmos or the concept of infinity, and I would find myself slowly looking away. Oh there's someone I know. I wonder what's for dinner? Was up

my phone? And that is the origin of the universe. Cheese tasty? You know what. I'm just thinking. The one thing I would quite like to be able to do. I would quite like to be able to read dogs minds. I know they're probably quite easy to read, you know. Can I fuck it? Can I eat it? But I couldn't scratch my tummy? There's that? Yes? And can I eat that hand? Or fuck it? I think there's some subtlety going on in there's something else going on. So I would quite like someone to tell me what my

dog is thinking at all times. I really like that, And that is a really true. Wait, can I tell you? Yes? My dog ran away from me at this fair we were at and I ran through the crowd and I found him with his paws on the shoulders of this woman and she was like, oh, oh yeah, oh oh goodness. And I was like, oh my god, Oh my god. My dog, and she was like, Hi, your dog was just telling me a few things, like would you like me to tell you? And I was looking around, what

is happening? Anyway? It turned out she was this really famous pet psychic, and my dog told her. She said, you have to get his bed back from the garage. And I'd literally got him a new bed the day before and thrown out his old one, and it was upstairs in the garage where I lived, waiting to be taken away. And he told her that. And then the other thing he told her was that my sister used to take him to work and my dog had most of his tail missing from a terrible accident with the door,

and my sister's boss used to call him stubborn. His name was Bubba, and he used to call him stumpy Stubba, and he didn't like that, and he told the pets psychic to tell me to tell him to fucking stop calling him that. Wow, it was heaven. They couldn't have known. She couldn't have known that. How could you have known that we had a pet psychic on the TV show

years ago? And this woman she was literally from the audience and actually had a dog and the dog told the psychic that the woman needs to put carpet back in the bedroom because he can't jump on the bed anymore because he can't get purchased on the wooden floor. And the woman, I mean, you saw the one's face, she was just like Honestly, I think she thought we'd broken into her house and taking pictures or something, because she had just taken up the carpet and put in laminte.

Oh my god, my god. And I also love the fact that dogs aren't like you know. I want you to teach me the secrets of the universe and take me on concorde. No. Have you seen that woman on Instagram who thinks her dog can talk to her wait when it hits the buttons? Yes, I've seen her a lot. It's sent task stick. I like the way if he just hits table and sleep. You dreamt about her table. You treamt about a table. You was so smart. Well, a major UK supermarket now sells a set of four

of those little things. Does it say fuck eat? Honestly, you can record whatever you like. I God, that's amazing. Yeah, we got them for Douglas the Dog. And what Starglass done with them? Nothing? Occasionally he'll walk on one by accident, and then we have to give him a treat or something. One of them does they treat, even that one. He hasn't figured out that hitting it will get him a treat. But he's an older dog, so you know, there is a saying about that. Also, it's like, you know, not

all dogs are like really smart. Like I've had very smart dogs, and I've had really thick dogs, like really thick dogs. Some dogs probably aren't chatty. Some dogs don't want to talk to you, and they're like, look, love, there's a whole reason I can't talk. They start trying to talk to me. That's what this life is about. It was about silence, about silence. Yeah, look, just feed me twice a day. Like that was the arrangement. So

what's the buttons? Stuffed with the buttons? The buttons? Now, what person, place or experience most also to your life? I would say San Francisco. I was in a hippie commune in San Francisco when I was twenty and twenty sounds quite old, but I was an Irish twenty, which is like a sort of international fourteen, let's say. And I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I had done two years at university studying French and English, but I wasn't enjoying it. I didn't like being in Cork,

and so I ran away. I ran away to San Francisco, and through various accidents and alchemy and luck, I ended up in this hippie commune. It's still there. It's still there in San Francisco. Oh my god, how amaze, just off the Panhandle. And I had never met people like this before. People with convictions put me right off, put

me off the life. But they treated me, you know, they treated back in an adult there was the chore wheel, and you know, we had to cook one night and I'd have to cook for you know, twelve people, and I couldn't cook for one. Can I just get twelve pot noodles? Do that for everyone? That's okay, right? And I went back. They had a kind of a twenty five year anniversary ten years ago, and I went back to see them, and this one woman, she said to me, oh,

we still make your soup. And I'm like what. Apparently I had made some leak and potatoes soup, of course, the potatoes in it. And she still makes it she calls the Graham soup. But weirdly, that woman, I remember she was studying to be a nurse, and she was I think she was forty maybe forty one two, and she was studying to be a nurse. And I remember thinking of the time, like like, why would you bother? Like really, really, lady, you're training to do something in

your forties. It's too late for you. And I must have said that to her, hopefully not as boldly as that, but I must have questioned starting a new career or being a student in her forties, and she went, well, if I am a nurse for rest of my life, I'll have been nursing for twenty five years, you know, untill her retirement. And I was like, oh, that's that's longer than I've been alive. I can understand that is

a long time. And it gave me, in my little young life, it gave me kind of the gift of time, of realizing that in a life, although they go by in a flash, we also have more time than we think we do. And I think that's something that young people should know. Don't be in such a rush. You've got time to fail, You've got time to six seed. You've got time to not succeed or succeeded the thing you don't enjoy, and then find the thing you do enjoy.

You know, when I turned fifty, there is a sense, oh, the bike is at the top of the hill and the rest of my life is now downhill. But then you realize, oh, no, I'm only fifty. Yeah, you know, with a bit of luck, there's decades of this ship left. I better find things to do and find challenges and things that I haven't done yet that I want to get done. So and that all came from that hippie commune.

Don't be scared of failure, because actually there's time. I think it was Victor Hugo who said fifty is the youth of old age. Yes, I really, I really like that. And by the way, that when you're in your twenties and I remember thinking I had to get it all done, I didn't even know what that meant. But the amount of time I spent worrying that I wasn't doing enough, it's so interesting, like if one does think about it, not that time is running out, but rather there is

a lot of time. I know. It's exact obverse of the meters ticking. Yes, but also that thing that no time is wasted in a way, no exactly, that if you find out that you hate doing something, it's going to help define what you do want to do. Yeah, I think that's brilliant for all of us. Actually to go, you've got a bit more time. You've got a bit more time than you think, because how old were you when you kind of thought I've made it. It was for about fifteen minutes, but you thought it. It didn't

happen in the moment it happened. When I sort of looked back, I must say that I thought the zenith of like being on the red carpet with my mom and dad at the Oscars when I was nominated for an oscar. They made it real, like seeing them right there and like my dad squeezing my hand and not being flustered by any of it, just seeing him sort of dadding in that insane environment. There was a lot

going on that night. But looking back the next couple of weeks, I did go, actually, it's kind of what you said from the Snoopy cartoon, and I was like, I'm not sure it's ever going to get better than that. I think I peaqued I think I succeeded. We don't feel that anymore, No, God, No, because that was this

barometer that I had said of what success look that. Yeah, And once you get rid of that barometer or beautifully or wonderfully, if you're lucky, that life will sort of teach you that that success and failure are lovers intertwined. One is not bad and one is not good. You have to name them differently, and you really start living at once. I started letting other things into my life that were great and amazing. I remember we had a reunion for drama school. I think it was a twenty

five or thirty year reunion. And of course when your kids at drama school, we were all, you know, teenagers, early twenties, and we only measured success in one way. Success was being a star, or having your name up, or working in theater or working in film and television. We all there's a whole group of people twenty eight of or something, and we all had one vision of what success was. And so to meet up thirty years later and realize how diverse success is. You know, some

people were still acting and that was their success. Some people were now artists, some people who had families, some people have started businesses. You know, there was one woman and she had an illness and she was in her mission. So just being there was her success. Because I kind of thought, oh, it'll be a weird day because some of these people will be you know, quote failures now and I will be the only true star. They're all going to hate me, Mini, They're going to hate me.

And I felt so stupid because when I got there, I realized, oh, we've moved on. If we got in a little tell transportation device when we were in drama school and went to the future and found out that, you know, a couple of us were still in the industry and doing well, then it would have been a very bitter, horrible day. But the fair that you didn't and the fact that we lived all that life in between and you got there, and I was so struck by it. The people and it. It goes back to time,

doesn't it. You know, as you navigate life, you find your job oi and you find your successes in all different sorts of ways. As you now know. Yes, and then I think we're brutal with our ideas of like really adhering to a notion of what is success and what is failure and being traumatized by this prescribed idea of failing. Failure is so I can't remember the quote,

it's Winston Churchill. I'm totally paraphrasing and watching it. But success is enjoying the failures in between failures like that, it's all failing and trying not to and enjoying that process. I thought you were going to say success is enjoying the failure of others. By the way, that would be something that would be something that Churchill could also said he probably did. He probably did. It was so great, Thank you so much, Thanks for this many It's been fun.

Graham's fourth novel, Forever Home, is out now and for our friends in the UK, Graham will be on tour to discuss the book through October. So if you've enjoyed hearing his musings, and I know you have, please do catch him live. Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer Aaron Kaufman, Producer Morgan Lavoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown. Original music Sorry Baby by Mini Driver, Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Executive produced by Me Mini Driver.

Special thanks to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison No Day, Lisa Castella and Annique Oppenheim at w kPr de La Pescador, Kate Driver and Jason Weinberg, and for constantly solicited tech support Henry Driver,