Norton’s knife crime hell: I was stabbed & left for dead

BY MARK JEFFERIES GRAHAM Norton has spoken about the knife crime epidemic after once being left for dead in a stabbing.

The BBC star, 56, said “everyone is a victim” when someone is knifed because the attacker is often too young to realise the consequences of their actions.

Graham has been attacked twice with a knife and was seriously injured in 1989.

But he added hearing about stabbings now “doesn’t trigger anything” in him because they are so commonplace.

Graham 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. 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.

“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.

“In the moment, it was, ‘I want that phone’, or, ‘You’ve got the keys to the car I want to steal’.

“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, sister, mother or father, you wouldn’t do it.

“Somehow people have been dehumanised.”

He said younger people had long been “incredibly cruel” to each other.

He said: Bullying has always been incredibly vicious. I think young people can be quite cynical and brash and brutal. It’s a modern malady but if you read Dickens, crime was horrific. It’s about economics. “It’s about people with nothing and if you’ve nothing to lose, that’s scary.” Graham was stabbed in the chest in Kilburn, West London, when he was a student at drama school. He said: “I lost a bit over half my blood. It was touch and go.” Graham was speaking ahead of the return of his award-winning chat show on BBC1 at 10.35pm tonight. Graham Norton