Graham Norton

There were real laughs to be had, and plenty of them, on Just a Minute (Radio 4, Sunday), the last in the current series. The mood was already rather hysterical ("When I look at that beautiful masculine form I can't help but think of King Kong" said Paul Merton of host Nicholas Parsons) when Gyles Brandreth was given the topic of "pretentious vocabulary". Off he went, unstoppably, unleashing a torrent of verbal flourishes. So unstoppable, in fact, that they let him go beyond the full minute. Moments later, Brandreth was emboldened to assert that he has no hair on his body at all. "Show us your chest," suggested Parsons. "Dear Lord," muttered Pauline McLynn. "Off, off, off!" chanted the audience. "What on earth," asked Graham Norton, "has happened to Radio 4?"

TV matters: The Graham Norton Show

Graham Norton's back - and he's parked his tanks firmly on Jonathan Ross's lawn.

Although Graham Norton was in his finest form about five years ago on Channel 4, his squawky chat show moves tonight to BBC One. The first guests are that rare combination of the incomprehensible and the ageless, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, chat show perennial Ricky Gervais (who was on Jonathan Ross's show just a month ago) and ballad mistress Olivia Newton-John.

Graham Norton on his move to BBC One: interview

As his chat show moves to BBC One, Graham Norton talks to Ajesh Patalay about money - and Jonathan Ross.

Norton warned over lesbian joke

The BBC has reprimanded Graham Norton's chat show for perpetuating "potentially offensive stereotypes" of lesbians.

Graham Norton's 500k pay cut

Graham Norton will stay at the BBC - but is set to take a £500,000 pay cut.

A 'grown-up' Graham Norton for BBC1?

The move of Graham Norton's chatshow to BBC1 will see the comedian "grow up", according to those connected with the show, although there will still be room for some fun and games.

Although not quite as miscast as fellow BBC family ent host Graham Norton, Steve Jones is nevertheless an odd choice for this, another TV quiz show. A Question of Sport-lite (circa 1970) with a bit of Screen Test thrown in, Jones struggles to make his scripted one-liners and banter seem anything other than forced. One senses that, like Norton, he's desperate to add some irreverence with a less-santised commentary. The feeling of to be or whoquite knowing what it wants to be or who it wants to appal to isn't helped by the show's erratic quest list, which by the show's erratic guest list, which runs from Pauline Quirke to Lauren Laverne.

Sorry Graham, smut's Nort on

Graham Norton will be banned from gratuitous swearing and smutty comments when his chatshow moves to BBC1 under strict new decency rules.

I am not one to take against a garrulous homosexual - they constitute the greater part of my social and cultural diet - but the opening episode of Alan Carr: Chatty Man was the nearest I've ever come to shouting: "Just shut up, you rambling poof!"

While there has been amazing progress over the past ten years in making this country less homophobic (Graham Norton getting Eurovision, bisexuals on Doctor Who), the dark reality is that that many people have merely swapped homophobia for "finding gays cute".

I attended an advance fan-screening of Torchwood last week, and every piece of dialogue between Captain Jack and his boyfriend was greeted with knowing, slightly hysterical laughter from the audience - as if everything that the characters were saying was high-camp, bitchy banter. In actuality, a great deal of it wasn't, and some of it was outright sombre - yet it was all drowned out by Pavlovian giggling at the "cute queer couple having a bitch-fight".

If we really are reducing gayness to camp, in terms of social progress, it's going to be as useful as supporting sexual equality - but only so long as all the women are giggly and have big tits.

As a camp man at a crucial moment in his career, then, Carr has some mighty socio-sexual-political currents to swim against. Alas, to the disappointment of any watching recruitment officers at Stonewall, Carr's new chat show consists of little more than an hour of pointing at things - Bruce Forsyth, pictures of people from Big Brother, his own set - and squealing. It makes Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served? look like Harvey Milk.

With an hour of airtime to fill, without Justin Lee Collins, Carr appears not to generate any actual material - he just relies on mannerisms. The third line of his opening monologue is on Britney Spears: "She sings like she's talking through the intercom at a drive-thru McDonalds." Unfortunately, the line also appeared in a Mirror interview with Carr, printed on the same day - a pretty damning index of his productivity. The conversational topics for his first guest, Bruce Forsyth, were: how big Bruce's chin is, how old Bruce is, whether Forsyth knows who will be on the next series of Strictly Come Dancing? (no), and how old Forsyth is again. Forsyth seemed exasperated by the end - like an old, greying horse being harassed by a tiny Jack Russell.

Most damningly of all, the audience laughed at everything Carr said - like a previously unknown experiment involving Pavlov giving his dog a biscuit every time Larry Grayson said, "Shut that door".