Graham Norton has admitted that his early forays into live presenting didn’t get off to the strongest of starts.

While the Irish presenter has now fronted everything from the Eurovision Song Contest and the Children In Need telethon to the BBC’s musical theatre talent searches like Over The Rainbow and Any Dream Will Do, his first live broadcast was on the oft-forgotten, short-lived Strictly Dance Fever, which served as a halfway point between The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing.

The show was Graham’s first project with the BBC after they poached him from Channel 4, where he’d had big success with his talk shows V Graham Norton and So Graham Norton.

And episode one… well, let’s just say it had a bumpy start.

Graham recalled to Late Night With Seth Meyers: “It was my very first live show and I was hosting a dancing competition – don’t ask.

“So we’re standing in the studio, waiting to go live, the audience are there, the dancers are primed, and suddenly there’s a newsflash – the Pope had died.”

He continued: “I’m on stage, and they’re in my ear, and the newsflash is going on, there’s a guy live from Rome… and they’re going, ‘OK, when we come out of the opening titles sequence, there’ll be no applause’, and I’m going ‘OK’.

“And then, they go, ‘no, there will be applause, but no cheering’. ‘OK’. ‘When you read the opening thing, emphasise the tension of the competition, but not the excitement’... anyway, what they forgot was that when the newsflash ended, it goes to a black screen… and then that merged into our opening credits.”

However, Graham noted that what the team had forgotten was that the show’s opening sequence also began with a black screen “onto which walked me, in a white suit, approaching a big switch”, which he then pushed “signalling bumping dance music and neon signs exploding”. 

“It was like I just said to the nation, ‘yeah, the Pope’s dead… who cares! Let’s dance!’,” he quipped.

Graham, of course, is now best known as the host of his own Friday night talk show, which has now been running on the BBC for almost 20 years.

Elsewhere during his Seth Meyers interview, the star opened up about the one A-lister whose anecdote on the Graham Norton Show had to be cut, and the unexpected origins of his iconic “big red chair”.