Do you hear our hearts breaking? That’s the sound of VIP Towers imagining a Friday night without our favourite chat show host Graham Norton.
Graham has revealed he plans to get out of TV within eight years, and it seems there is little his fans can do to change his mind.
The 52-year-old is adored for his brilliant format of interviewing Hollywood legends on the same couch, and although the BBC star loves what he does, he has put a limit on how long he will be doing it for.
“I’ll retire before I’m 60,” he said. “You want to get out when people are still watching your show.
“You don’t want it to be when people say: ‘That is still on, that is still a thing?”
Graham continued: “This is the 18th year of me doing a chat show. We’ve been working up to this moment of being on BBC1 on that prime Friday night slot, so we’ve always been inching forward over those 18 years.
“The thing no one wants is the inching backwards, where you’re kind of going: ‘Yes the cast of Towie can come on…’ That’s about retiring when you’re on top.”
Talking with his Radio 2 show co-presenter Maria McErlane in front of an audience in London, ahead of the publication of his memoir The Life and Loves of a He Devil, the Cork native said he’s not jumping to leave but it is “in (his) head”.
“You want to get out when you can still enjoy your life,” he explained. “Neighbours of mine worked and worked and went on this trip of a lifetime round the world. They had to be airlifted three times because they were too old to do this trip. They got stuck on every hike they did.
“So I don’t want to be them. You want to get out of work when you have still got time to enjoy your life.
“I do love my job. I might really miss it and then I will feel like an absolute fool. You can’t come back. You could only come back to do I’m a Celebrity or Celebrity Big Brother or really awful things.”
He added that he would prefer to live alone for the rest of his life than deal with the petty problems of being in a relationship.
“The older you get, the less right you have to be fussy and yet the older you get, the fussier you become,” he said.
