INTERVIEW:Graham Norton, once outrageous but now less so, talks to London Editor, MARK HENNESSY, about his new affinity for Ireland and his chances of replacing 'Wossy' as king of BBC chat

SITTING IN THE comfortable surroundings of Shoreditch House, a private members’ club in London, Graham Norton quietly and comfortably muses on the Ireland he left in the 1980s, and on the Ireland to which he now often cannot wait to return. Now an established British television star, Norton has all the trappings of success: a nice home on the river in London, a country bolt-hole on the south coast and, most importantly, a retreat on Sheep’s Head in west Cork.

He spends an increasing amount of time on Sheep’s Head – two months in the summer, a week at Christmas, and other occasional visits during the year. Hemmed in by snow, Norton had a week of isolated seclusion there last Christmas, unable to travel into Bantry as he usually would, “to potter around the shops to buy things I don’t need” and call into a local pub.

“My family were supposed to come and join me for Christmas, but every day the roads were too bad and they couldn’t come. So I spent about a week absolutely by myself and I turned into such a piss-soaked recluse. If I actually lived there it would become very easy just to turn into a crazy old man, so I probably shouldn’t spend any more time there than I do. I did enjoy it, but I was aware by the end that this probably wasn’t any good for me,” he says.

Next week he returns to Dublin – for the first time in five years – to open an exhibition of the letters collected by his former English teacher, Niall MacMonagle, and his students, as they gathered poems selected by well-known contributors for the Lifelines anthologies.

Norton grew up in Bandon, the last of a number of stops made by his family as they followed his father’s Guinness job, and spent much of his time thinking about how he could get out of Ireland. “I just spent my whole life there thinking, ‘I’m going to leave’. It never really crossed my mind that I would stay. From an extraordinarily young age I sat around waiting to go: I mean really young, 10 or 11. I knew.”

When he did leave for London, he did so with relish: “At the time I left, if you had come to me at the airport and said, ‘there will come a time you will actively want to spend time here’, I would have thought that you were mad.

“ it is a different country now from the one I left. What is good about Ireland is that it hasn’t really lost itself, but it has shirked off a lot of its smallness,” he says, nursing a non-alcoholic drink in his hand.

His mother, Rhoda, typifies the change: “If someone had told her 30 years ago, ‘your son will be a notorious homosexual, but you won’t mind’, she would have thought it was like Macbeth – the scene with the witches.”

But while Ireland has changed, so too has Norton. Faced with the question, he stops and ponders. “Yes, to a degree. There is a bit of that, too. When I go back to Ireland now I have money in my pocket. I have a very nice life, but it is more than that. Wherever I am, I will be somewhere nice. I’ll be in a nice hotel, or a nice house,” says Norton, who has been fortunate and knows it.

His country homes have revealed much to him. His British one, and he mentions it pleasurably, but not boastfully, is “down on the coast, in East Suffolk, or Sussex. I don’t know. I know how to get there. Like I say, I like the location. I know nothing else about it. This past weekend I was down there and I was thinking, ‘this is different to Ireland’. Because I don’t just go back to Ireland for the house and the garden.

“I go to the English one because I like the location, and that’s it. Ireland I go back to – and yes, I like the house and I like the location – but I like the world it is in. I like shopping in Bantry. I like going to the pub. I like it all.”

So does he feel middle-aged? “Yes, I do. Finally. Turning 40 seven years ago was big. When you turn 40 you say, ‘who am I supposed to be now?’ You have a persona, but it doesn’t feel quite right when you pass 40.

“But I have settled down now. I am all right. I was comfortable in my own skin, but then 40 came along and I felt, ‘ooh, I am not sure who I felt I would be at 40, but this person isn’t who I thought I would be’. It isn’t that you make a conscious effort to change, but it is like dust settling. You say ‘okay’, and you find your feet again. How long did that take? Two or three years. That was my mid-life crisis,” he says with a laugh.

Today, his long-running TV series is in its 12th year, and he has replaced Terry Wogan as the UK’s “voice” for the Eurovision Song Contest, “which I think is a nice pat on the back”.

Already, he has been the subject of countless press stories that he is in line to take over from Jonathan Ross once the latter stands down in the summer from his Friday night BBC show.

Understandably, he replies cautiously, partly, it seems, because he is doubtful that the BBC thinks Friday nights must have a chat show: “That is not how the BBC, or indeed how British television works. There is a chat show there because that is when they show Jonathan Ross. That wasn’t a chat-show slot. So it is not like the US model, where on Wednesdays at 7pm, you have a sitcom.”

But he hedges his bets quickly. “Now, having said that, it is a very good slot, so if they asked us to do it, I imagine we would say yes. I wouldn’t want to do an hour. I think an hour is too long for a chat show.”

This year his show, produced by his own company, So Television – when he talks about the programme he usually talks about “we”, rarely about “I” – will pass its 500th episode mark: an eternity in TV’s often fickle world.

“People think it is the same show, but if you look back at the early shows it has changed a lot. Even in the last series it changed a lot. It changed in that there was more of an emphasis on the interviews. It was more of a ‘talkie’ show than it has been. We sort of simplified the comedy. There were fewer big set-pieces, very few ‘proppy’ things. It was much simpler and much more based on the guests.”

Some of the changes were made to ensure that neither he nor the crew got bored. Some were made to cope with the more conservative winds blowing through British television, and society.

“The audience has changed. For once, I don’t think it is the BBC imposing a false prudishness, or a false morality. The audience at the moment – and this will change, things go through cycles – wants kinder comedy, they don’t like cruelty in the way that they did, or crudity in the way that they did. I don’t know why, but it is something that I have noticed. In the past, we would do a really disgusting joke and we would get a big, big laugh and then we’d have to cut it out because it was too disgusting to have on TV. And we’d go, ‘what a pity, we can’t have that on air’.

“Now you do a really disgusting joke and the audience don’t like it. At the moment, they don’t feel comfortable with it. It is interesting how gentler humour is doing well in this time.”

Norton, who trained to be an actor, but “couldn’t have been much good at it because I never got a job”, believes the audience is always right: “There is an alchemy to jokes. Some work, some don’t.”

The ending of Little Britain, often viciously cruel and crude, but extraordinarily popular in its time, illustrates the changes, and it has been replaced in the public’s affections by Gavin Stacey. “That is a much gentler, happier place to be. There is no crudity. It is a very gentle world. Look at Michael McIntyre. He is so mainstream, like a 1970s comedian. He is the biggest sensation. I was talking to Dara O Briain about this and they have noticed it in Mock the Week, where stuff that would have gone well stopped going well.

“You don’t want to fight with an audience. I have no interest in fighting with an audience. You are doing it to entertain them. If you have stopped entertaining them then you should stop. What’s the point? No one is getting anything out of that. I am still doing risqué jokes, but in the privacy of my own home. I suppose you realise that as you get older it becomes less seemly to be doing vile, disgusting jokes.

“I don’t know what that is about, but the joke becomes a different joke when the person telling it is older,” he says, chuckling.

Middle age has its losses, but also its gains. Norton seems happy with the trade.

Discover Lifelines: letters from famous people about their favourite poems, is at the National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin 2, until June 10th. Admission is free