Biografia

In 1989, he was stabbed in the chest by muggers and left for dead.

He grew up as Graham Walker in Bandon, County Cork, Ireland. When he won his first BAFTA in 2000, it came the week after his father died. He dedicated the award to Billy Walker at the ceremony but only his family and friends knew who he was referring to.

In December 2001, the first ever talking waxwork was unveiled at Madame Tussauds London museum featuring a Graham Norton replica as the lifelike figurine. Visitors are offered three options of Norton's impudent catchphrases: innocent innuendos, cheeky banter, or X-rated doubles entendres.

During his first visit to the U.S. in 1983, Norton attended an audience test screening for Negócio Arriscado (1983), a fact he revealed to an astonished Tom Cruise when he was a guest on New Years Eve Special (2012).

In 2000, he turned down a reported £5 million contract offer from the BBC. Among other things, the BBC wanted him to take over as host of Blankety Blank (1978).

I am really bad at actually interviewing people. My chat show really is a 'chat' show, in that we do just witter on because most questions you come up with you either know the answer to or are never going to be answered. It's fine to have a show all about the guest if you're talking to Bette Davis or Frank Sinatra, but if you are talking to someone from Emmerdale Farm (1972) - I mean, I am not that interested, are you?

Russell Harty was one of the first interviewers who was a personality himself. Then of course came Dame Edna. Her show was incredibly subversive and led the way to others fronted by characters like Mrs Merton and the Kumars. Shows have now been taken over by comedians and the like, who have big personalities of their own. This evolution was inevitable.

In Ireland we had The Late Late Show (1962) hosted by Gay Byrne who, a bit like Michael Parkinson, despairs of the modern chat show and will probably be horrified to hear that he inspired my show in any way, but he did. It was an endless show - it lasted about three hours - and was very free-form and brilliant.

For a long time we played catch up with American chat shows, but I think we have now overtaken them. In the end it's obviously still one person talking to another on a sofa, but we make a bigger effort here to differentiate our shows. In the States they are all identical, they even have the same set - a big window with a skyline in the background. But a British audience expects more and we have been forced to push the boundaries of what a chat show might be and what you can get the guests to do.

You do get big Hollywood names now but they are media-trained to within an inch of their lives so it's hard to get them to talk about themselves or share an opinion. You even get clauses where people will specifically ask not to talk about certain subjects - their boyfriends or their divorce.