This week Norton brings his low-rent version of “The Tonight Show” to America, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The show, renamed “The Graham Norton Effect,” will tape in New York and broadcast Thursdays on Comedy Central. It will still traffic in the eclectic stew of dishy celebrity chitchat, R-rated show-and-tell and raunchy humor. Will this fly in our post-Janet Jackson universe? Norton himself isn’t sure. “It’s an odd climate to be launching this in,” he says. “There’s bound to be suits twitching in the wings. They don’t want to be causing more trouble.”
Not that Norton plans to cut his comedy to fit this year’s fashions. He says Comedy Central won’t interfere with him–he actually backed out of a deal with NBC when the network started to muck around with his work. Still, Norton knows the danger of being a stranger in a strange land. “Jay Leno was over in London filming our show, and we had this stupid calendar. It was really clean for us–just pictures of dog turds in the snow. Leno was like, ‘God, that’s funny, but we could never show that.’ But you can see that on the street!” says Norton. “We may hit walls we do not know exist.”
