Ever since he quit university and Ireland, to jump on a plane bound for New York, Graham Norton has been surprising himself. "I never felt like a confident child, I never felt like that guy, I always felt very timid. So I don't quite know where I got the confidence to go, 'I'm leaving, I'm filling a backpack and I'm out of here', but I'm so glad I did," Graham says, still rather amazed as he flits back four decades to the moment his jet-setting life took off.
The sharp-witted chat-show host and TV personality is ready for cocktail hour in his London flat having recently returned from seaside West Cork, where he now spends three to four months a year recharging at the stunning period home he bought in the mid-2000s in Ahakista on the shores of Dunmanus Bay. This pretty village, on the amusingly named Sheep's Head peninsula, is just an hour or so's drive from Graham's childhood home in Bandon, and has become a haven for the TV star whose current existence is a lot less frenzied than his well-spent younger years. Back then he flitted between Britain and the US, building a career that led to his current status as one of TV's hottest properties.
"If someone had told me as I waited to board a plane to New York in 1983 that one day I would move heaven and earth to spend three months every year in the country I was desperate to flee, I would have told them that they were crazy," he says. But Ireland has somehow morphed into a homing beacon for Graham. It's where he recently chose to get married - which we'll come to later - where he frolics on the beach with his dogs (only one dog currently, having lost his soulmates Madge and Bailey in recent years) and also where he worked on his latest opus, which he confesses is another surprise.
"There was a time in my life when I thought I would never manage to write a novel, so to be publishing my fourth feels a little surreal and very special," he sighs.
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