TV presenter Graham Norton has revealed he was stabbed and left for dead in a 1989 attack.
The Cork comedian said he was stabbed during a mugging in the 1980s when a student at drama school in London.
He said he lost "over half his blood" adding that "it was touch and go".
It was one of two such incidents, he told the Mirror.
Norton was talking about the knife crime epidemic in England.
He said he often felt now that "everyone is a victim" when there was a stabbing, because attackers were too young to realise the consequences of their actions.
"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, it was outside a club," he said.
"Somebody wanted money and had a knife. And 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 friend sister, mother or father, you wouldn't do it. Somehow people have been dehumanised."
