Irish TV star Graham Norton has spoken about the terrifying moment he was stabbed and left for dead after being attacked in the 1980s.
The chat host, who was a drama student in West London, was in his early 20s at the time.
He was walking in London’s Kilburn, which turned out to be the wrong place at the wrong time as he was confronted by a gang of muggers.
Norton suffered life threatening injuries in the attack and sent two weeks recovering in hospital.
He said: “It was very serious. It was a mugging, I didn’t even realise I’d been stabbed in that classic way, because your adrenaline is pumping.
“I looked down, and I saw all this blood. I lost a bit over half my blood. It was touch and go.”
Norton has previously written about the attack.
In a harrowing passage he penned in 2009, he said: “Horrible, horrible, horrible as it is to contemplate, I was stabbed in the chest, at about 3am in the morning, Friday, 8th of July. Needless to say, it was a bit of a waking hell… Not wishing to sound melodramatic, but I knew I was dying.”
Norton also revealed it was not the only time he had been a victim of knife crime.
“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.
“Somebody wanted money and had a knife. What’s so sad about the knife crime now is that everyone is a victim in the end.”
The BBC star now lives in London which has recently experienced a surge in knife crime.
Norton believes the state of the economy is the number one reason that many youngsters are turning to violence.
He said: “It’s modern in that people have knives, but I’m not sure it’s a modern problem.
“Young people are incredibly cruel to each other. Bullying has always been incredibly vicious. When you’re young you don’t understand what others are going through; you’re so busy looking after yourself.
“It’s more about economics than modern society. It’s about people with nothing. And if you’ve nothing to lose, that’s a really scary place to be.”
He added that everybody is a victim when it comes to knife crime.
He said: “Because people are losing their lives and equally the kids stabbing people, their life is destroyed for nothing, for this stupid thing because they couldn’t get their heads around the consequences.
“‘I think it’s a lack of imagination in the end, that if you had the empathy, that level of imagination to think it through, that the person you’re stabbing could be a brother friend sister, mother or father, you wouldn’t do it. Somehow people have been dehumanised.”
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