Graham's growing pains

He orders fish and white wine; his weight-loss regime means he only eats things that are pale, and drinks what he can see through. It seems to work. "Seeing yourself on television, you notice the folds of flesh," he says. "So I hired a personal trainer and started going to the gym."

Is there more pressure on a gay man of 41 to look good? "Oh God, yes," he says, "you girls will go out with anything." He is in town filming a

show for Comedy Central, a US cable channel (he owns a minimal townhouse near the mid-town tunnel), before returning to London later this month to start filming a Saturday teatime show for BBC1. What made him accept their offer this time around? Isn't he afraid the BBC will interfere, that they'll turn him into Larry Grayson?

"No. I have more clout now. It's just I felt too old to carry on doing what I was doing on Channel 4. I had to go somewhere else in terms of career longevity. I prefer to fail trying something new." In a way, it's a relief because before "the people of Bandon were glad to have a celebrity, they just wished it wasn't me."

What, so now perhaps Bandon Grammar will ask him back to give a speech? "It's just that all the things I thought I was running away from were the things that were shoring me up. My father's death made more sense of things than anything else." He has also just written ("completely on my own; it took nine months, like a baby") his autobiography, So Me, published this week.

He is a surprisingly tender writer; there are very few gags and instead large chunks of his schoolboy diaries; reading them back, he was appalled that there is no real difference to his writing then and now. He hopes his mum doesn't read it, but there isn't much that will shock her here. Despite the fact he spent a year in San Francisco in the early Eighties, there is scant mention of Aids.

HE never actually told his parents he was gay, although they might have had an inkling when he used to dress up in the net curtains when he was eight. His mother phoned to ask him why they had to hear he was homosexual from the telly. "But you told me not to upset my father," he said.

He is worried about Scott reading it, though. I thought he came across pretty well; he left his home and his job (driving tourists in the back of a hearse to where celebrities had died) and his dog in LA to move to a shoe box in Columbia Road, east London, while Norton was hardly there, he was always working. "We are still close, and I told him all about the book, but it is still my version of events and, yes, he is going to be upset."

I tell him I live opposite Grange Court, the tower block in Hackney where he spent five years living in a squalid flat on the 18th floor, just him and a desk and an old wheelchair he had got from a junk shop. The lift, when it was working, used to have mysterious fires burning in it, or would open to reveal a lone German shepherd, travelling nowhere.

"Years later, I would drive along Queensbridge Road on my way home and I'd think, I didn't develop a vaccine, but from the Holly Street estate to where I am now is a big old leap."

He said once that if everything disappeared tomorrow, he would be fine. "I wouldn't miss the fame, that's true," he says. He's quite enjoying walking the streets of New York with no one knowing who he is. "I still plan for failure. I'm always calculating how little I can live on, what I could sell, and that frees you up, you're not terrified."

THE night before he filmed his first show for Channel 4, he had an anxiety attack. " I thought, nothing is worth this." It was then he realised the worst thing that could happen would be that he would go back to waiting tables in Covent Garden, and as bad as that job was, it had never made him feel like this. I tell him the thing I liked most about the book, apart from the scene where his sister vomits on Mo Mowlam on New Year's Eve (" terrible to vomit on anyone, but somehow worse when it is the lady who brought about peace in Northern Ireland"), is that he likes women. He even went out with one, Elizabeth, for a year. His mum's reaction to his being gay was to say, "I just think it's such a lonely life." Was she right? Is he lonely now? "I don't judge loneliness as to whether I'm in a couple or not. I have a really close circle of friends, and they are my family. I'm not procluding meeting someone and if it worked out, great, but I don't judge my life like that."

He admits that "only young men are stupid enough to go out with someone because they are on the telly". He did have a brief affair recently with someone who is 40, but it didn't work out. "But it did give me faith - I was like, oh good, I can go out with people my own age. I was getting a bit worried that I was turning into Michael Winner." Would he like to be a father one day? "No, I don't think so, I'm still not feeling broody." I ask him what I should do with a free afternoon in Manhattan. "You should go to this lovely kitchenware shop," he says, excited, lifting up a shiny carrier bag , eyes shining like the little Protestant boy he was who wet his bed and watched Charlie's Angels on RTE and had a crush on David Cassidy. Saturday teatime should suit him down to the ground. As we get up to leave, the PR for the hotel comes over and says there is a photographer waiting in the bar. "It's almost like you're famous," she says sweetly. "Almost," says Graham, going to strike a pose in a shiny tower block with scented, perfect, Alsatian-free lifts.
So Me is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99. Graham Norton will sign copies at Waterstone's, Piccadilly, tomorrow from 11.30am.

Liz Jones stayed at the Mandarin Oriental, Columbus Circle, NY, and flew with United Airlines