GRAHAM NORTON WAS on the other side of the couch on yesterday’s episode of This Morning with Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby.
Norton chatted away with Philip and Holly, covering a variety of topics from how he’s preparing for the 20th anniversary episode of The Graham Norton Show to that time Mark Wahlberg ended up falling into a drunken slumber on the show.
Philip eventually brought up the topic of Carrie Fisher.
The actress had been a close friend of Graham Norton and died of a heart attack two weeks after appearing on his show.
Here’s what Graham had to say:
It was extraordinary, because it transpired that it was her final interview. And you know that thing where you’re like ‘OH, if we had known! I wish we’d done a better job’ because you just think oh, she’ll be back in a minute. It was such a shock.
Because she’s someone who wasn’t in my life all of the time, y’know, she would pop into London or I’d be in America and we’d see each other, it has taken a long time to kind of figure out she has gone.
Graham told Philip and Holly how the interview almost didn’t even happen.
She did nearly cancel. She was ill and I feel bad talking about it because then it’s as if we knew. We didn’t she was just a bit under the weather. She was sick.
She did nearly cancel and then she thought ‘Oh, Graham will be nice to me’, so she got herself in a car, got herself in the studio and got through the show. We just thought ‘get well soon’ and then when we heard the news of the heart attack, [we all] thought that was terrible. You sort of thought, that can’t be the end of Carrie Fisher. She was such a life force. She was so larger than life.
The final interview with Carrie Fisher touched on the topic of her affair with Harrison Ford.
Carrie had written about it in her book, and up until Graham’s show hadn’t considered the fact that Harrison Ford would be getting asked about this for the rest of his life.
In his appearance on This Morning, Graham said that Carrie had felt terrible after this was pointed out to her.
So, because of that, Graham didn’t bring it up in tonight’s interview with Harrison Ford.
You know he’s not going to talk about it. He’s just going to go “I have no comment.” And he’ll shut down. I think it’s my job to keep the conversation flowing. I’m not a journalist. Who cares? I’m not the police. I’m not there to interrogate.
That explains why Graham has managed to keep his show going for 20 years anyway. Graham finally returns to BBC One at 10.35pm tonight to chat with Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Reese Witherspoon, Margot Robbie.
