Don't Go! Graham Norton is Planning His Retirement Already

We say "already", the man has been bringing us his brand of talk show wizardry for the guts of 20 years, why wouldn't he be thinking about retiring? Um, maybe because we desperately need the antithesis of The Late Late Show on our boxes of a Friday evening?!

There is some solace, however - the 52-year-old has said he'd like to retire before he's 60, so at least he's given us approximately 8 years to get our heads around the idea. OK, so he might be gone sooner, but we're not going to deal with that right now.

Speaking at a BBC Radio 2 shindig, he reportedly said: "I'll retire before I'm 60... You want to get out when people are still watching your show... The thing nobody wants to do is the inching backwards, where you are going, ‘Yes the cast of TOWIE can come on.’ I’m not jumping tomorrow but it is in my head. When it comes to chat show wars, yes you always try and bag the biggest guests and at the moment we do seem to be having a good run of it. But these things go in cycles. That will turn and change... 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."

This news has mad people on twitter very sad...

Speaking of currently being single, he added: "You have your own rules as you get older. I would prefer to live alone for the rest of my life rather than live with towels that were folded incorrectly. Petty is important. That’s why marriages break up. Marriages don’t break up because of big things. The older you get, the less right you have to be fussy and yet the older you get the fussier you become, so oddly when your standards should be dropping you find them getting higher. You see younger friends starting relationships and you know how that story ends. You just sit there and wait for the end. When you’re young if you meet a partner and they’re cheating on someone to be with you but then they go with you, you think: ‘That’s great.'... So I’m careful. Why do you want to be heartbroken again because if you keep being heartbroken you’re a moron."

As for the beard... "My beard is staying for now. My beard has its own Twitter account and it was tweeted by Jamie Dornan’s beard, which also has a Twitter account."

What would you do on a Friday night in the absence of Graham? Or is a television without Graham a future too bleak to contemplate?