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The Graham Norton Show
Graham Norton with guests Jennifer Lopez, Andrew Flintoff and David Mitchell at the filming of a recent show. Photograph: Ian West/Press Association
Graham Norton with guests Jennifer Lopez, Andrew Flintoff and David Mitchell at the filming of a recent show. Photograph: Ian West/Press Association

Why Graham Norton’s national service is worth waiting for

This article is more than 9 years old
Catherine Shoard

Making everyone do a compulsory stint waiting on tables could make the world a better place – just spare me the egg mayo

Like many people, I’m fond of Graham Norton. I like his policy of sticking four Hollywood A-listers together on the sofa rather than indulging each in turn. I like his warm embrace of dogs and wine. I like his surprisingly bracing agony uncle column.

At the weekend he gave an interview in the Times that sealed his status for me as a sort of oracle. Everybody, he said, should be a waiter for a while, like a sort of national service. “Not only do you become a nicer person to waiters in later life, but also you figure out how to read people. You discover that a lot of people are vile, you discover how easy it is to be nice, how easy it is to be a shit.”

It’s more than a decade since my last waitressing shift and I’m still feeling the benefits. Hour for hour, those months were probably the most memorable of my working life. The errors made and the horrors witnessed stay with you long after the customer has vomited, or the dropped steak knife has shattered the champagne flute on the special anniversary supper. Waitressing is a crash course in human anthropology. You learn how to navigate. How to cope. And how to carry loads of stuff on your arms all at once.

It’s not just waitressing. In retrospect, I also got a lot out of stints as a call-centre worker, a housekeeping maid and a freelance ironer. Mostly, it has to be said, they were negative lessons: how not to treat someone trying to sell pet insurance, how not to leave a hotel bedroom, how not to get creases out of silk. The knowledge I gained from a brief fortnight cleaning a pub is too terrible to share. And I still balk at the memory of making sandwiches at a racecourse, each day heading into the big fridge to unhook transparent plastic swatches of vacuum-packed hardboiled eggs, like a grotesque set of shower curtains. Each egg needed freeing from its briny sac, then slopping it into a big bucket for mashing. I can still hear the belch of mayo leaving its industrial tub.

And yet, inevitably, you forget. You earn more money and slip towards being the kind of person you once rolled your eyes at. Plus there’s a fundamental difference between learning such lessons early, with the expectation of moving on to something cushier, and doing it for what could be good. A little while back, I manned a tea stall at a charity fun day; it turns out that any transaction, even when it’s not for profit, means people treat you less well than if you were on the other side of the doilies.

So perhaps Norton’s national service plan should not only be rolled out but expanded to those already in other employment, along the lines of jury service. A compulsory month in Cafe Rouge, with all the attendant cleaning chores, might make the world a nicer place. Just don’t put me back on egg sandwich duty.

Critical conspiracy

I’ve been to two art exhibitions in a fortnight – possibly a record. But what springs to mind afterwards isn’t Turner’s amazing way with a palette knife or Rembrandt’s knack of capturing 50 shades of sadness in a two-inch etching. It’s the queue and the wait, the stressed jig you do inside the gallery, shuffling to see a picture while not blocking anyone else’s view. Then, when you get your five seconds near a masterpiece, trying to mute the commentary of the stranger next to you, the wailing babies and the floorboards creaking beneath 500 pairs of feet.

Reviews never go into all this because reviewers go to previews, with hush and space and maybe a free drink. This is logistically necessary. Yet even if it weren’t, I suspect it would still happen. A sort of conspiracy of silence exists between critics and punters, motivated on both sides by self-preservation. The critics don’t want to acknowledge the hugger-mugger reality of cultural experience, because to do so would dilute their discourse. The public must remain in some state of denial as a way to cope. Go to the theatre and it’s rare the audience don’t clap hard as the curtain falls. Maybe they always mean it. Or maybe it’s because to admit otherwise would signify a loss of time and money too awful to contemplate.

@catherineshoard

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