Graham Norton reveals strict demand from Taylor Swift before appearing on his show

Taylor Swift appeared on the red sofa last October to promote her latest album (Picture: Matt Crossick/PA)

Graham Norton has revealed the one demand Taylor Swift had when she joined his BBC show line-up late in the day last October.

The recently married chart-topper appeared on The Graham Norton Show, which she has labelled one of her ‘favourite shows’, to promote her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl.

But sitting on the iconic red sofa alongside an eclectic mix of celebrities, it did look rather cramped at the time.

Norton has now explained why, telling GQ in a new interview that she was ‘a very last-minute booking’.

He added: ‘The show was fully booked. So we thought, “We’re going to have to bump somebody”.

‘Word came back from Taylor: no one must be bumped. And that was a good show to be on because everyone ended up in the Opalite music video. Everyone!’

‘Word came back from Taylor: no one must be bumped’ (Picture: Matt Crossick/PA)

@britishgq

If Taylor Swift says no one gets bumped off the sofa, no one gets bumped off the sofa. “And that was a good show to be on, because everyone ended up in the ‘Opalite’ music video,” Graham Norton tells GQ’s Ben Allen at GQHeroes.

♬ original sound – British GQ

Indeed, the full roster of Norton’s sofa from that Friday night featured in the track’s music video, which dropped in February.

The list included Irish actor Cillian Murphy, Lewis Capaldi, Domhnall Gleeson, Greta Lee, and Jodie Turner-Smith.

It was during the Norton interview that Swift decided to cast her sofa compatriots in her next project, as she told fans after the video dropped.

Domhnall ‘made a light-hearted joke about wanting to be in one of [her] music videos’, which led her to be ‘instantly struck with an idea’.

Swift said she got the idea to include the sofaguests in a project during the show itself (Picture: BBC)

‘I had this thought that it would be wild if all of our fellow guests on the Graham Norton show that night, including Graham himself, could be a part of it too,’ she penned, describing the broadcaster as ‘insanely charismatic and loveable’.

‘Like a school group project but for adults and it isn’t mandatory. To my delight, everyone from the show made the effort to time travel back to the 90s with us and help with this video.’

She added that she ‘got ridiculously lucky with the group [she] was paired with, as they were ‘all people whose work [she’s] admired from afar’.

It was also after that sofa appearance that Swift invited Norton to her spectacle of a wedding at Madison Square Garden in New York, which both grabbed headlines and courted controversy.

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