Graham Norton - The Best Of DVD

Before his talk show So Graham Norton found infamy and acclaim filling the Friday-night saucy viewing slot on Channel 4 (a position formerly occupied by The Word, Eurotrash and the diabolical Denise Van Outen series, Something For the Weekend), Dubliner and one-time stand-up comic Graham Norton was probably best known to UK television audiences as the annoyingly chipper Riverdance-fan, Father Noel, in that episode of Father Ted where they have a caravan holiday. A seeming cross between a leprechaun on amphetamine and John Inman, Norton is a consummate ringmaster for... the show's unique combination of audience embarrassment, celebrities, minor and major, game to be mocked with fawning irony (including Roger Moore and a number of ex-Bond girls, the divine Grace Jones, Catherine Deneuve and Mo Mowlam, among many others) and telephone pranks to unsuspecting fetishists abroad. On the DVD: In addition to the usual menus and chapter selection, there's a wry commentary from Norton in which he reveals he didn't like Billy Zane very much and that Mo Mowlam was unsuccessfully bullied by the spin doctors not to do his show. Plus, there's a six-minute interview with his nibs in which he cheerfully describes the show as "trivial fey nonsense" and defines "gay icon" as "someone who hasn't worked for 20 years or has done a really crap job for about 20 years". It concludes with a special message to DVD buyers: "Thank you for buying the DVD, and congratulations on being a little bit rich. I hope it doesn't end up being our generation's version of Betamax or a big audio-visual version of the Sinclair C5". --Leslie Felperin [show more]

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