Why Graham Norton wants to get China into Eurovision

Eurovision has been screened in China for the past two years and Australia has been given a wild-card entry. Would you like to see China enter, too? “The Eurovision is a wonderful thing, but one thing it doesn’t need is any more songs in it! No one at the end goes, ‘If only that had been longer!’ Will China enter it? I would not be at all surprised. It would make sense from Eurovision’s point of view because it’s such an enormous market – and also, in a way, it would be quite nice to have China join in because I find Eurovision a very optimistic way to look at the peoples of the world.”

You’ve described yourself as a “borderline alcoholic”. Is there any relationship between how much wine you have in your glass on the show and how badly an interview is going? “I suppose if there’s less wine in my glass, it’s because it’s going well because I’m talking less ... so I’m drinking more. Isn’t it terrible, but I like it when the guests drink. Mark Wahlberg has been on the show and I’m pretty sure he was drunk. When I walk out and say hello to the audience and I see drinks lined up on the coffee table, I’m thinking, ‘Oh good’, because I think it sends out a signal that they intend to enjoy themselves. There’s going to be an element of pleasure for them, even if talking to me is hell.”

You have a very British/Irish sense of humour. Why do you think it works so well internationally? “I don’t know why it works anywhere. I can pretend, ‘Ooh, my show is so popular,’ but it’s the guests that are popular. I remember growing up in Ireland, and if I’d been watching my show, I would have thought it was impossibly glamorous that these people were in a room talking together. And I think that’s still true, that London does seem like a showbiz capital – for how much longer, we don’t know...”

If you could speak to your younger self, what advice would you give? “Young people think it’s got to happen now. But the ’plugging away’ years are not wasted. You’ve got more time to fail than you think, because you’ve got time to start again. You know, at 53, I’m a debut novelist, whereas my 30-year-old self would have thought, ‘Oh, Why bother? You’re 53, you’re almost dead.’”

In all these years of doing the show, what has it taught you about people? “The guests I feel like I have actually encountered or can have an opinion about tend to be the ones who properly listen to the other guests and aren’t just sitting staring at the monitor waiting for their own face to appear. A lot of the guests do do that! I don’t know if it’s a celebrity thing or just a vanity thing. If you put a dog on a couch, it would look at itself on a monitor as well.”