Whatever you thought about the way Graham Norton chose to celebrate the millennium, his party, watched by millions on Channel 4, certainly went with a bang. As the clock struck midnight, a scantily clad German woman spread her legs and fired a ping-pong ball from her vagina. It was so Graham Norton.
And while this piece of TV may not have popped everyone's cork, it is exactly the type of vulgar, yet oddly compelling, stunt that won the Cork-born comedian two BAFTA awards last week. It is also what had the BBC panting at the prospect of getting their hands on TV's campest property.
The rumour is they offered £6 million, but concerned that the Beeb, who would probably have wasted his considerable talents by having him host Blankety Blank, might call a halt to the antics of folk like Frau PingPong, Norton stuck with a mightily relieved Channel 4.
His Friday night programme, So Graham Norton, has pulled in record numbers of viewers for the station since the first series was aired two years ago. Norton's stage persona, shocking yet playful, outrageous but loveable, has been attracting every one from broad-minded Grannies to hipper-than-thou teenagers.
The show - the fourth series ended recently - is a mix of juvenile audience pranks, crank phone-calls, Internet surfing and high profile guests, many of them gay icons such as Joan Collins, who are as entertained by Norton as the viewers are. It's a mock chat show in the tradition of Caroline Ahern's Mrs Merton, but with a distinctly lavatorial twist.
Some recent "highlights" include a camera being inserted down a man's trousers to view his piercings and Grace Jones matching a pile of underwear with its owners in the audience. Then there was the episode where audience members took photocopies of their bottoms to be examined by an asstrologist who just happened to be the mother of Sylvester Stallone. It's all done in the worst possible taste.
While the show features a multitude of props, including a toy dog phone whose mouth opens when the person on the other end speaks, the show would be just another late night smutfest in the absence of the 38-year-old gay man from Bandon, Co Cork.
He is the latest in the long line of camp TV stars in Britain - following a proud tradition started by the likes of Kenneth Williams ("Oooooh!"), John Inman, ("I'm free!"), Larry Grayson, ("Shut that door") and Michael Barrymore ("awwight?").
"It's an odd thing but there is only ever room for one gay star at the top of British TV at any one time," says one comedy critic. "At the moment Graham is that person. Before him Julian Clary was the most outrageous gay funnyman, now he is doing Daz ads. Then Graham Norton came along and he was even more outrageous."
The camp label is not one Norton encourages: "It's a bad word," he has said, "a very bad word."
"I found that really hard, accepting that I am quite camp. But there's a natural lightness, a feyness to some people, and I don't know how that happens." His main appeal, aside from his natural ability to totally crack people up, is that when he pokes fun (at his guests, the Internet weirdoes, the audience or himself), it is fun of the gentlest kind. It keeps ratings high, and guests coming back for more - Geri Halliwell announced on his show that she wasn't getting enough sex a few weeks ago, something she may or may not have discussed during a cosy chat with Michael Parkinson.
NORTON is not normally associated with that slew of comedians, Tommy Tiernan, Ed Byrne and Dylan Moran et al who have led the Irish invasion of British TV in recent years, probably because his Irishness is in no way central to his act. In fact, the rubber featured comic emigrated from Ireland in his early 20s.
Graham Walker (his real name) attended Bandon Grammar School. His father Billy was a Guinness rep, his mother Rhoda was active in the mother's union. He was Protestant, and though he hadn't realised it yet ("sex wasn't discussed in our house") he was gay. "Growing up in Bandon was a pretty isolating experience," he has said. "Only 2 per cent of the population were Protestant, as we were, and even fewer were gay."
After two years at University College Cork studying English and French he left his home county and ended up in a hippie commune called Star Dance in San Francisco. There was a brief engagement to a woman ("how stupid was she?" he asks) and a spell working restaurants and bars before he headed to London to become an actor.
While he spent a few years in the Central School of Speech and Drama, it soon became clear that Norton's talents did not lie in serious acting. In the early 1990s he began to write comedy monologues, his first attempt, Mother Theresa of Calcutta's Grand Farewell Tour, led him to the Edinburgh Festival where he was a regular for much of the 1990s. Another offering was a piece called Karen Carpenter's Bar and Grill. In 1997 he was nominated for the prestigious Perrier award.
But the first mainstream TV outing, came courtesy of Father Ted, when Norton played the manic Riverdancing (and camp naturally) priest Father Noel Furlong. Father Ted writer Graham Linehan said he worked as a presenter because there was a slight innocence about him. "You never feel disgusted. I've always thought of him as a sexual tourist; someone wandering around the world of sex, genuinely surprised by everything," he said.
Carnal Knowledge, a lewd version of Blind Date, marked his first solo foray on Channel 4 and he won best newcomer award at the Comedy Awards after he stood in for Jack Docherty on his Channel 5 chat show. It wasn't long before he was given his own gig which has evolved from cult late night viewing to one of the tackiest jewels in Channel 4's comedy crown.
AND NOW Norton, who lives alone in London after splitting with his long-term American boyfriend, is the proud owner of two of British TV's sparkliest baubles, the award for Best Entertainment Presenter and Best Entertainment Show. He beat hot favourite The Weakest Link for the latter accolade. He has lost two stone since the first series and now has a healthy wardrobe budget, which allows him to indulge in the expensive, if trashy, suits he favours when performing.
When not on stage or in the studio he wears casual Prada and is described as being quiet, thoughtful and intelligent, and at times crueller in his humour than he is on TV. Receiving a BAFTA last year, he dedicated the award to Billy Walker. Nobody knew he was referring to his recently deceased father. To Norton's delight both parents had been over to see So Graham Norton being filmed, and while his mother Rhoda finds it funny, she has a problem with some of the more risque gags.
"When my Mum saw the one where I stuck a mini-camera down a man's pants she said: `Do you have to show that? Really do you have to?' " he said.
While the next series of So Graham Norton starts in the Autumn - it will be interesting to see how much further he can take the once outrageously original, now familiar format - he is also planning a movie based on Green Card. With the working title Pink Card, it is about the struggle of a gay man to get a visa for his American boyfriend to live in Britain.
Whatever happens he won't be getting serious.
"What I do is very trivial. I would be no good at anything serious. It's just not me."