PLUME: So how quickly after the award nomination was your own show proffered to you?

NORTON: Well, we were already talking about it, because I’d enjoyed it – guest hosting. I was in talks with the executive producer of that show about my own show for a different channel. We’d gone, we’d pitched it, they were kind of going, “Mmm, well, maybe. Yes, we quite like the idea.” Then, awards are like that, they just kick start people – because executives are not very confident. So if somebody else says you’re good, they go, “Oh yeah, yeah, I always thought he was good. Yeah, of course we’re giving him his show.” So that’s how we got it, and we came on air and we did, I think, seven shows in the middle of the summer, and that was our first season.

PLUME: Was the format the same as we see it now?

NORTON: You know, off the top of my head, I would always say yes. But then I look back at early shows, and of course they’re so different. They’re very different to what we do now. So the format is sort of format-less, and yet very formatted. It’s always changing, and we try to change things as soon as we’re getting a bit bored with them… we try to change them so that hopefully we’re getting bored with them before the audience gets bored with them.

PLUME: Was it difficult getting guests in the beginning?

NORTON: Oh, hell – absolute hell. It was a host they’d never heard of, and in the middle of the summer. It was tough. It was tough.

PLUME: In watching the episodes, I’m stunned by just the diversity of the guests that you have.

NORTON: Well, for the first few series certainly, I was very picky about who I’d have on. It had to be people I genuinely liked, or genuinely thought would work. Now that we’re five nights a week here, it’s open to all comers, really. It’s a much more celebrity based chat show. We just book people who are around. I mean, we still do the occasional specials, and we’ll still fly people in sometimes, but it’s much more of a just ‘who have we got tonight?’ kind of thing.

PLUME: But even then, it seemed that there would be quite obscure actors – like the mother from The Waltons.

NORTON: Oh, I loved her. She was one of my special treats. I would indulge and do that. “I’d like to meet the mother from The Waltons!”

PLUME: But I think the fact that it worked so well…

NORTON: No matter what, how awful a show is, the fact that I asked her, the fact that we flew her over – you know, Michael’s got to think, “Oh, the boy can’t be all bad. He does like me.”

PLUME: I think the amazing thing, as a viewer watching the show, is that you visually see this learning curve when the guest starts to realize, “You know, the interview really isn’t about me.”

NORTON: Yes, it’s so good when they get that early on.

PLUME: Then you have some – and I’d like to proffer an apology for the entire country – when you have someone like Cybill Shepherd on …

NORTON: It’s funny, Americans are really embarrassed by Cybill Shepherd, and she was fine.

PLUME: She’s the only one I saw that ever brought you almost to a stand-still… just being stunned at her behavior…

NORTON: What was stunning me – and again, it got edited out slightly – but there was almost a full-blown catfight going on between her and that English guest, Cilla Black.

PLUME: I could see some of that.

NORTON: Some of it we couldn’t cut out, because it was just dripping. But that was the thing that was really, really getting to me. The fact that, “Oh my god these guests are so not getting on.”

PLUME: But she got on with Orlando Bloom…

NORTON: She liked Orlando, yes. Poor little Orlando. I think we might have to have him back as an apology.

PLUME: Like a deer in a sea of headlights.

NORTON: Yeah.

PLUME: But it’s amazing when they finally learn that – in comparing it to American chat shows, celebrities will come on, and it’s like a robot… “I have to hit this point, and promote this, this, and this. And you have a card from the pre-interview, so let’s do this and then I have to get out of here and go to dinner.”

NORTON: I’m really not sure who the pre-interview helps in a way, because if the guest is bad, a bit stiff or whatever, knowing what they’re going to be dull about – it doesn’t help.

PLUME: It doesn’t make them seem any less wooden.

NORTON: Yeah, you just kind of, “I knew you were going to be dull about this, and sure enough – you were.” I just want to be bored for the first time and amused for the first time.

PLUME: The amazing thing is that you can see this point where – verbally, through the question, or whatever you pull out of a drawer – you’re practically slapping them awake. It’s the first time you see a lot of these celebrities actually engaged in an interview situation. It’s amazing.

NORTON: Well, maybe because we haven’t got a pre-interview, so they do have to kind of listen to the questions. Well, question…

PLUME: As many of them that come before a prop comes out or it’s time to play a game…

NORTON: The interesting thing is – less so now – again, now that we’re five nights, we just kind of churn these things out. We have to do one every night, and they have to go out that night, so there isn’t time to do editing – but on the early shows, those were really quite long records, so often there would be a proper interview in there.

PLUME: I guess the other thing is I’m seeing them through the filter of – these are edited for BBC America as well, aren’t they?

NORTON: Now are they? I don’t know.

PLUME: Because the show runs what, 55 minutes?

NORTON: Sometimes. The new ones don’t. The new ones run 24 minutes.

PLUME: Because all the old ones, we see as 24 minutes. It’s the most amazingly truncated experience, because you can tell that there was more of an interview or something more was happening, but all of a sudden it’s cut off. There’s these hard edits all throughout.

NORTON: Sorry. We don’t edit them, that’s all I’ll tell you.

PLUME: I can tell you don’t, by just how awkwardly they’re edited.

NORTON: It’s probably just things like they’ll chop off big things that were topical or they’ll chop off big things that were only explicable to a British audience, maybe. I don’t know, I haven’t seen them. But I’m guessing that’s what they do.

Continued below…

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