Barry Humphries starts a celebrity beef...

Barry Humphries has accused Graham Norton of nicking his ideas.

The satirist said he first came up with the notion of ejecting boring guests from a talk show, back in the days when he was hosting them as  Dame Edna Everage.

And he jokingly accused the BBC chat king of ripping him off with the famous red chair on his hit show.

‘I used to see guests coming on and they would often have to come down a staircase… and I thought what would happen if the host looked at the guest from afar and thought, "Do I really want to talk to this person?"

‘If the answer was negative, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could press a button and the guest would abort,  would disappear?

‘And of course I had chairs, too, that did this. And this has been flagrantly plagiarised by Graham Norton, who owes me a fortune. He has never  apologised for this larceny. Not a single royalty do I get for that device!

‘But my fans will suitably rebuke him.’

Humphries, 87, launched his tongue-in-cheek celebrity beef on Esther Rantzen’s After Life podcast.

Published: 18 Apr 2021