Graham Norton says being stabbed ‘changed his life for the better’

Simon Kelly

“I lost half my blood.”

Graham Norton has opened up about being stabbed and said that it “changed my life for the better”.

The Irish presenter explained that he was attacked by a group of men in 1989 in the Kilburn area of London while walking home alone.

Norton initially didn’t realise he was stabbed until he saw the amount of blood he was losing, and an elderly couple walking nearby saved his life by calling an ambulance for him.

Graham Norton says being stabbed ‘changed his life for the better’

In an interview with The Telegraph, the Cork man said that being stabbed was the worst moment of his life, saying he lost half his blood.

“I was in the hospital ward and I remember a nurse came up to me and said, ‘Do you want us to contact anyone? Do you want us to contact your parents?’” He recalled.

“And in my head, I was thinking, ‘well, I don’t want to worry my parents but equally, if I’m going to die, they’d probably like to come and say goodbye to me, because they’d be annoyed if I didn’t tell them.’ So, I said to the nurse, am I going to die? And she went, ‘Eerrrrm…’ and I was like, ‘don’t pause. This is not the place to pause. This is quite serious.’ So that was bad.”

However, the 60-year-old said that while the moment was the worst of his life, there were positives to take from it after it happened.

Graham Norton opens up on horrific life-changing stabbing incident.

“The positive of it was I was probably in my mid to late 20s; I was going into a third year at drama school, and it just put everything into perspective.

“They were doing the castings for the third-year shows; there were a lot of people crying and running into toilets and slamming doors. And I was just sitting there going, ‘I’m alive. I’m good. I’m golden.’ So, in a way, it kind of changed my life for the better.”

It wasn’t the last time the BBC presenter was involved in knife crime. In an interview with The Mirror, he revealed that someone threatened him with a knife outside a club some years later.

Fortunately, he wasn’t alone this time and there was a crowd nearby, which resulted in nothing happening.

He said: “I did have someone pull a knife on me again a few years after the first stabbing but there were people around and it was fine, it was outside a club. Somebody wanted money and had a knife. And what’s so sad about the knife crime now is that everyone is a victim in the end.”