PLUME: Who would be your premium guest? What type of guest is the type that you look forward to?

NORTON: You know, it is a chat show still – even though it’s not a proper chat show, it is still a chat show – so the currency is big stars. So the bigger the star, the more kind of geeks we are to have them. Then on top of that, it’s kind of big female stars, ones that I grew up with. Having Cher on was fantastic, or Dolly Parton, Sophia Loren…

PLUME: The Dolly Parton show was wonderful…

NORTON: Well you know, Dolly is wonderful. She’s just fantastic. Her currency is quite low, I think, in the States, but I always have such a good time with Joan Rivers. Yet I think, maybe because American TV has to kind of neuter her and we don’t, and she always works really, really well for us. It kind of frustrates me that Americans don’t know how brilliant she is, that America somehow, on some level, has fallen out of love with her.

PLUME: Well, I think it was a matter of the cycles that America moves in – we kind of burned out on Joan in the ’80s. It’s hard to bring – no matter how brilliant – someone back to the limelight after they had such an intense period in the States.

NORTON: Yeah, I guess.

PLUME: In other words, we don’t respect anybody. The sad statement about it, “So they’re still brilliant – we don’t care. They’re not now.” Even Carrie Fisher doesn’t get booked in the States, but she’s brilliant every time she’s on your show – the web sites she brings with her are a little bit questionable …

NORTON: She brought them to our attention.

PLUME: At least she’s net savvy.

NORTON: She’s a complete net-head, yeah.

PLUME: Even the format of the show is interesting in that perspective. It’s the only show that’s tech heavy, as far as utilizing the web as well.

NORTON: It’s interesting that no one else has really picked up on that. We’re still the only ones doing things on the web.

PLUME: No one in the States does.

NORTON: Yeah, it’s weird, because everyone’s on the web. So it just seems odd you wouldn’t use it more.

PLUME: What for you defines a good guest?

NORTON: Well, like I say, it’s sort of changing as time goes on. It used to be … I really liked kind of people I’d grown up with, my kind of childhood heroes – which is why the mother from The Waltons was on, why you’d see Wonder Woman on there, or people like that. It just seemed a kind of celebration, and it just seemed like that was a really good way of defining the audience. You know, the audience for the show – if you don’t know who this person is, if you don’t like this person, then you’re not part of our gang, kind of thing. But now that we’ve gone five nights, it has really changed. Now it’s much more – the booking is much more standardized, in a way, into just kind of celebrity chat show thing.

PLUME: Just out of necessity?

NORTON: Well, kind of. You know you’re trying to get guests five nights a week, and you’re trying to appeal to a broader audience over five nights a week, so you kind of need to open it up. It’s fun… I like it. It’s kind of liberating, because you find yourself talking to people who, in the old show, I’d never have had on, but I now really enjoy them.

PLUME: What type of people best exemplify that sort of openness now to people you wouldn’t have had on before?

NORTON: I guess we used to have very, very, very few pop stars on. Like, on the old show, I’d never have had, say, Moby on. But Moby was a brilliant guest. He was really – Moby’s big in America isn’t he?

PLUME: Oh yes.

NORTON: Okay. Moby was a fantastic guest – very, very funny, really got into the show, and he is very famous and he is very popular. But in the show, I would have kind of said, “No.” In my head, he wouldn’t have kind of fit the criteria of a guest on the old show. So it’s people like that, I think.

PLUME: So, just out of necessity, the boundaries have expanded.

NORTON: Yeah, but it’s kind of a good thing. I don’t want that to sound like a bad thing. I’m pleased.

PLUME: What, in your definition, would be a bad guest, or a poor guest?

NORTON: I guess a guest who carries sadness with them, isn’t good. Sometimes there are people who are in the tabloids, so they’re very current, very famous, and on that level should be a good guest, but we wouldn’t want them because you think, “It’s just a bit of a downer, and I don’t want to talk to them about the bad thing that happened and there’s nothing else to talk to them about.” Those sorts of people we try to avoid. Really, you just want people who are just going to join in.

PLUME: How often have you encountered people that wouldn’t join in?

NORTON: Really, really rarely. We prep these guests as much as we can, so we make sure they’ve seen the show, I’ve talked to them beforehand, the producers will talk to them beforehand. I’m sort of, “Join in as much or as little as you’d like. We don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable, blah, blah, blah.” But it’s always better when they kind of – at least if they kind of laugh, if they find the crap funny. That’s slightly better.

PLUME: If there was one guest that would best exemplify a shell-shocked nature where you had trouble pulling them out of it, who would that be?

NORTON: Harvey Keitel, fairly shell-shocked, but that wasn’t really his fault. That was a combination of everyone’s fault. I think he thought he was just coming on a chat show, and I think he found it a bit much…

PLUME: That was a bit of shock, then…

NORTON: Who else…. Lindsay Wagner, who was the Bionic Woman – but in that instance, it was completely her fault. She had seen all the tapes, she’d had lunch with me, you know, she absolutely knew what she was getting into. And she just sat there like a big lump. You just looked at her and would think, “Why on earth did you agree to come on this show?” You know, it wasn’t like we were doing anything different.

PLUME: Do you find it’s usually always the Americans that are shell-shocked?

NORTON: Well, yes, in that I think the British people that are going to be shell-shocked just don’t come on. They’re too familiar with the show, so their agent or their publicist will just kind of go, “No, actually, my client wouldn’t like that show.” Or, “I know my client doesn’t like that show.” So we tend to avoid it more with British people.

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