Graham's no angel

Fortunately Norton has proved her wrong. One of his admirable qualities is his great capacity for friendship. He also falls in love, quite often, with chaps who sound ghastly and who always seem to let him down.

Apart from the relationship stuff which didn't interest me in the slightest, this autobiography does contain some truly alarming and brilliant descriptions of contemporary London life.

Norton's horrific experience of living in a flat on the 18th floor of a Hackney council block should be immediately faxed to the housing minister.

He'd been there a month when he saw in a Sunday supplement a picture of his tower block captioned 'this building has more cockroaches in it than any other in Europe'. Parts from four different human bodies had been found in one of the bathrooms. None of the lifts or communal lights worked.

Leaving the building, he was hit on the head one day by a cooked chicken thrown from an upper window. He and his partner 'screamed like two fat virgins seeing the Chippendales for the first time'. (Why fat virgins incidentally? Thin virgins scream, too, don't they?)

Chilling in the extreme is Norton's description of being mugged (for £6.50) in Kilburn, dragging himself off the cold pavement and discovering that he had been stabbed in the chest.

He was in intensive care for three weeks, having blood drained from his lungs and visited by his fellow drama students who, he insists, gathered by his bed to make a note of their feelings so they'd know what to do when they got parts in Casualty.

From Ireland, to hippie commune in Los Angeles, to drama school, to big break, to mega-rich celeb ('now I have money, I buy houses like people buy cans of tuna when they fear an impending food shortage. . . I have my house in London as well as ones in Cape Town, New York and Cork'), to being named the worst-dressed man in Britain, to being 40 and traumatised, Norton spills the beans in chatty and wildly phallocentric and egocentric style.

He tells us that 'a pigeon flying into a glass door couldn't have been more shocked than I was when I hit 40'.

His TV job, he says, involves his 'being a big kid night after night', and, thinking back to the ping-pong-ball lady, he boasts:

'It makes me proud to think that in years to come when archivists are going through how the arrival of the new millennium was marked by TV stations there on Channel 4 will be (the ping pong lady) with her legs in the air firing out ping-pong balls.' Proud? Say no more!

Yet, and here I must give Norton his due, one of the funniest things I have ever seen on TV was an episode of the cult Irish sitcom Father Ted.

In it a manic, guitar-twanging priest (Norton) and his wimpish anorak-clad youth group cram into a tiny caravan, sing dreadful folk songs and do Irish dancing until the caravan tips on to its side.

I was rolling on the floor. It was the first time I'd encountered Norton and I turned to my family and gasped: 'This man will be a star!'

He sure is. If only he'd stuck to sitcoms and spared us the Whoopiecushion wit and infantile lunacy.