Graham Norton swaps the glamour of his talk show for an Aussie Wheel of Fortune

Graham Norton is watching three contestants puzzle over a three-word phrase on the first episode of Wheel of Fortune Australia. The answer is obvious to everyone except one poor man, who decides the time is right to ask for an “h”.

If he had been on Norton’s chat show, he would have been thrown in the big red chair and unceremoniously flipped out of view.

“All you want to do is really help them,” says Norton, who is talking over Zoom from his London home, where he is just as good-humoured as he appears on screen, even when battling dodgy Wi-Fi.

“I know this is a classic game show host thing to say, but it is harder when you’re doing it on television. So there were moments when I knew the answer, the audience knew the answer, the other contestants knew the answer, but there’s a Wheel of Fortune snow-blindness that comes over people where they just cannot see it. I feel for them because it is humiliating when it’s on television. People going, ‘What? You didn’t know that?’”

Filmed in Manchester on the same set as the British Wheel of Fortune, which Norton also hosts, the reboot features Australian expats, who bring their broadest accent to answers such as “freestanding bathtub”. Contestants have to solve word puzzles by guessing consonants and buying vowels. It is daggy television and completely at odds with Norton’s much more glamorous day job hosting his eponymous celebrity chat show.

“I hadn’t really done a game show for years,” says Norton. “And I was thinking, ‘God, will I enjoy this? Will this be fun, or will it be hellish?’ And it was so fun. I imagined I might hate some of the contestants. I imagined I would be willing some of them to lose. But no, no one annoyed me. They were all genuinely lovely.”

Norton is an incredibly skilled host who has been in front of the camera for nearly 30 years (shout out to his three episodes as Father Noel Furlong on iconic Irish comedy Father Ted), with the last 17 of those on the BBC’s Graham Norton Show. He has turned the jolly celebrity interview into an art form, with a weekly gaggle of stars all jostling to tell the most amusing story of the night. And while Norton makes conducting multiple guests look easy, it’s actually a finely rehearsed piece of TV theatre.

“There’s a lot of prep that goes into it, and not just by me, there’s a whole team of people who do an extraordinary amount of research on the guests,” he says. “Then we spend a full day in the office going over the conversation on the couch, breaking it down: What are we going to talk about? Who’s going to talk when? And then on a Thursday afternoon, we do a weird thing, and for new members of the team it’s a really horrible thing, we do the show without the guests, with researchers playing the guests.

“And some of them are great. Some of them are better than the guest ever is. So you get a sense of what it’s going to be like, how much someone is speaking, or you realise, oh actually, god, [the guest] disappeared in the second half of this show. So we’ve got to find some things for them to say. It’s a very odd thing to do, but also it fixes the show in my head, so I understand the shape of it and the questions and where we’re going.”

It’s also very sanitised compared to Norton’s first chat show in the UK, Channel 4’s very naughty So Graham Norton. That was truly boundary-pushing TV, with Norton regularly phoning up sex lines, looking up rude websites or getting a dancer to fire ping-pong balls from her vagina to set off the new year fireworks (that last one is not made up, I watched it – agog – as a backpacker in London.)

“Luckily nobody saw it,” he says, laughing. “I think you were the only viewer. Most people who saw it were in the studio.”

Does he ever miss that more unhinged era of television? Have we become too safe?

“If someone wants to see somebody firing a ping-pong ball, they probably still can,” he says. “Certainly, in this country, those shows still exist, but I think nobody wants to see a man in his 60s hosting that show.

“When I started, I’d be asking the people in the audience to tell me details about their sex lives and stuff. And that’s funny. Thirty years ago, it was funny, now, it would just be creepy. In my opinion, you just wouldn’t want to see it. So in a way, I think I’m very lucky in that I’ve got to age on television, I didn’t get stuck.”

What has also changed in terms of broadcast television, says Norton, is clip culture. These days we are more likely to come across The Graham Norton Show on Instagram or TikTok, where short snippets of an interview are used and viewers never get to see the whole 45-minute show. And this has affected the types of anecdotes a guest is happy to share.

“We’re not complaining, in a sense, but a lot of it is consumed as TikTok videos,” he says. “So that [being clipped] used to be something that happened to you in a press interview, where your quotes can be taken out of context, and TV chat shows weren’t like that because your quotes were in context. You were speaking long form. And now, because of these little TikTok videos, it is possible to skew conversations and make things weird, so I think maybe guests are more nervous about that.

“But, you know, I’m not asking tough questions. The whole brand of the show is that we want everyone to have a nice time. I’m not going to ask you about that thing you said, I’m not going to ask you about your divorce, I’m not going to ask you about your battle with alcoholism. On a very real level, because I don’t care, but also because we want them to have a nice time. We want them to want to come back.”

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It was only a couple of weeks ago when a clip from Norton’s show went viral, when Irish actor Saoirse Ronan turned a lighthearted discussion between Paul Mescal and Eddie Redmayne about self-defence on film into a pointed comment on women’s safety.

“We really liked it,” says Norton. “Because everyone was having a discussion on the couch, including Saoirse, we’re all talking about the same thing and then it was like Saoirse put a button on that bit of the conversation. She just went, ‘And here’s the thing …’, boom! And it was great. It was a proper mic-drop moment, and the audience really liked it. It’s just extraordinary the way now things can take off.”

As for his favourite guests – and he’s recently landed some doozies, including first-timer Julia Roberts – Norton has a few Australians picked out, including Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie and the late Dame Edna. But it’s not their level of celebrity that makes a good guest, it’s something else.

“It’s because no matter how famous they are,” he says. “They remain interested in the rest of the couch, they listen. They don’t just sit there waiting for me to talk to them, because we have had celebrities like that. Australians are good at chat.”

We just have to learn how to spell.

Wheel of Fortune Australia premieres Monday, November 25, at 7.30pm on Ten. The Graham Norton Show airs weekly on Sundays at 8pm on Ten.

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