Pleasant, cheerful and a little exhausting: Graham Norton on Virgin Radio reviewed

In my parents’ house, the radio is always tuned to one of two stations: Magic FM and LBC. When Magic is playing, it wafts through the kitchen like an over-scented camomile candle. LBC, by contrast, hits you like a strong gust of Novichok: it is undiluted poison, carefully synthesised from the DNA of hysterical US shock jocks. At times, they feel like the two paths for modern radio: a draught of herbal tea or a fit of apoplexy; James O’Brien having kittens or ‘Broken Strings’ playing constantly, for ever.

Where does that leave the chatty host, the one who natters cheerfully while you potter aimlessly, who rabbits on while you faff about doing nothing? Listening to Graham Norton’s new show on Virgin Radio, I often felt as though I were listening to something from a slightly earlier time, before all media had been optimised to either soothe or infuriate the consumer. You wouldn’t know we were living through the biggest crisis since the second world war, listening to Norton. On weekend mornings for three hours, he broadcasts from an imaginary normal world, where the viral pandemic is just something nagging away in the background rather than pinning you down while it coughs in your face. In this sense, he joins an ever-expanding list of movies, films and even novels that take place in a parallel universe, where none of ‘this’ is happening. As it happens, I rather like it there.

As radio, it’s fairly standard stuff: an advice segment, an interview, a competition that no one wins. But in present circumstances, a dose of something cheerful is not to be sniffed at. Norton has always seemed like one of the sharpest knives in the box, even when he was squirting salad cream on to Denise Van Outen’s cleavage (this is not a euphemism).