However, the host - who is often confronted with troublesome guests on the show - embraced the fun on today's pre-recorded show. The woman looked out at the rest of the room with her arms folded, then she turned around to face me, looking furious (and said), ‘My son is worth 10 of you’.

I’m amazed I’ve never had a cake in my face! No, they’re lovely people and seem to enjoy me poking fun. I like to think my faux-meanness is a way of taking all the angry voices on social media or in the tabloids, and laughing at their negativity. That wink or raised eyebrow is very ingrained in camp culture; it’s about playing with meanness so it loses its power. A lot of queer people experience the world as quite a harsh place. Laughing at it is an act of subversion that makes it more bearable. There’s great comfort in laughter. One night, I started my set and I was talking about the experience of being gay and living with my parents. Tom, Tia Kofi, Lawrence Chaney, Ru Paul Charles, Shirlie Holliman, Martin Kemp and Suzi Ruffell on Celebrity LingoAn extraordinary portrait of a son navigating his way through grief and loss in real time. Funny, candid, and measured’ GRAHAM NORTON SATURDAY Kitchen was even more chaotic than usual today when comedian Tom Allen appeared on the show.

There is comedy as well as pathos, much of it focusing on Allen’s conflicting desperation both to fit in and to be special. Occasionally, self-deprecation crosses into self‑flagellation, and some of his analysis is painful to read. He has a perfectionist’s eye (and an obsession with interior design) and is expert at skewering the banality of grief – such as when a funeral home “resembled less a threshold between this life and the next and more a conference suite … the sort of space a local accountancy firm might hold its quarterly meetings”. The Apprentice: You’re Fired! presenter added that a group of rugby players who were in the audience took him out in the city afterwards and got him “absolutely hammered” to help him get over it. Join Tom Allen, star of stage and screen, as he discusses his hilarious, honest and touching new book Too Much, followed by the chance to ask questions in an audience Q&A. Tom then started making retching noises while Matt introduced his "celebration of cauliflower" recipe, an ingredient he dislikes.verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ My dad’s funeral had a reassuring sense of ritual, but all high ceremony is camp. I’ve always quite fancied myself as a vicar: I like the outfits, you get a free house, there’s a lot of parading up and down aisles. In a way, church is like Drag Race. I love talking to the slightly more mature bakers, partly because that’s kind of how I see myself. So I enjoyed Carole and Dawn this year, Maggie last year, Linda and Rowan the year before. The older bakers are always fun. The comedy started just a minute in when Matt introduced Tom, with the stand-up star replying: "It's a real thrill... for you."

I have always made a point of talking in the first person because, after all, how can you know what anyone else’s experience has been? In his new book Too Much, the comedian joked that he always gets confused by Northern Ireland’s two main airports. A group of rugby players were in that night. Very kindly, they took me out afterwards in Belfast. It was so much fun.The idea of “too much” takes on several meanings. “Dad and I were very different and at times I worried I could be too much for him,” Allen begins. “For example, I was brought up to resist any unnecessary dramatics. For my parents, this was an uphill struggle.” Elsewhere, it feels “too much” to ask straight friends to go with him to a gay bar. He worries that “if I started living my life too much, there would be a price to pay”. No favour was ever “too much” for his dad. His loss is “too much to understand”. With his hallmark honesty and wit, Tom writes beautifully about those days, weeks and months following loss, and about how bewildering the practicalities of life can be in the wake of an upheaval – those moments, really, when everything can start to feel a bit too much . . . I used to think: I’m going to live in a flat in somewhere trendy like Elephant and Castle, which is essentially just a roundabout, living the urban gay hipster dream. I’ll grow a moustache, it’ll be great. Eventually I realised that isn’t me at all, and found this house around the corner from my parents. Suburbia is where I’ve always felt most comfortable. In the hinterland between countryside and city, you have a bit more space to play. My dad grew vegetables and I thought that would be a healing thing to do. It’s very calming to watch how things grow. When I’m in the garden, everything is all right. After my post-gig treat, which that night consisted of chips, they got me absolutely hammered so that I didn’t really remember the strange experience with the odd person at the gig, and they proved that despite the negative experiences, there are always more good ones to celebrate than bad.” Writing my first book, No Shame, I tried to be as honest and vulnerable as I could. I found that the more you talk about being an outsider or feeling different, you realise everybody’s an outsider in some way. In a world of social media filters, it’s refreshing to strip that away. Honesty seemed to work, so even though it was a seismic change that I went through with losing my dad – and also getting a boyfriend and finally moving out of my parents’ house – I decided to write about it in a similar way.