Graham Norton has defended his wages from the BBC and compared them to Phillip Schofield's yearly salary in a new interview. The star of the Graham Norton Show receives a salary of £610k a year from the BBC, though this doesn't include his fee from his chat show, which is paid through a private production company. Chatting to the Radio Times about criticism regarding the highest paid TV personalities at the BBC, he said: "For some reason MPs want to know what famous people at the BBC earn. If they could get ITV to tell them what Phillip Schofield gets, they’d love to know. Also, I have to say, what would really shock the public is to discover the disparity between ITV and BBC. People would go, 'Wow!'"
Graham opened up about his BBC salary
He continued: "You may hate me or Gary Lineker or Zoe Ball but that’s not just what the licence fee is paying for. It's paying for this overall thing. And it’s not like I want to dob people in it, but you read that list and go, really? Me and Gary Lineker are top of the tree? No. We all know there are people who earn a lot more than me and Gary."
He added that people be compared to ITV salaries
Graham, 56, recently opened up about some of the more challenging guests who have appeared on his chat show, and revealed that there was one guest who "took our breath away" due to their odd requests. Chatting on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he explained: "You get used to it but the one that kind of took our breath away… This person will remain nameless. I'll call her 'she'. She wanted for herself nine dressing rooms and we go, 'fine here's your nine dressing rooms.'"
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That afternoon, I'm sitting in the production office and one of her minions comes into us and says, 'It's a 911 situation. We need another dressing room.' So, Catherine, our line producer, is very organised, she gets on the phone, 'I'll get you another dressing room. Out of interest, why does she need another dressing room?" and was told, 'Oh, she wants to charge her cellphone.'"
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