Graham Norton told Patrick Kielty on Friday's Late Late that he missed out on one particular Irish guest early on in his chat show career.
"You're at the stage now where you can basically interview anybody you want," said Kielty. "Was there anyone over the years that got away?"
"I mean, in the early years, everybody got away," Norton recounted. "I did a book tour and I was showing clips of the old show - I'd forgotten how out-there the Channel 4 show (So Graham Norton) was. It was so rude!
"It's hard to get guests on a new chat show anyway, but, you know, we were visiting dodgy websites, we were calling sex workers - so who the hell was going to come on this show?!
"But we still asked everybody, we would ask everybody. It was season two of So Graham Norton [and] we asked Daniel O'Donnell would he come on. And here's the thing - he said yes! I was delighted and I just thought, 'Well, Daniel O'Donnell must have a really good sense of humour! That's great that he's coming on the show'.
"So we put it in all the papers - 'Daniel O'Donnell's on the So Graham Norton show on Friday, da, da, da'. And that was all fine except that the Friday before he was supposed to come on, either Daniel or someone from Team Daniel actually watched the show. Suddenly, Daniel 'very busy'! That grass needs cutting!
"That was fine, but it was too late to get it out of the papers, so it still looked like he was going to be on the show. Anyway, no Daniel, we forgot about it.
"We had Roy Scheider from Jaws, he was on, and we had, forgive me, it was a long time ago, it was a different world... we did an item where we did a webcall to a woman in Paris called Madame Pi-Pi. You can imagine yourself - there was a brandy glass involved! Don't Google it, please don't Google it!
"So anyway, we did it, and that was fine, good fun. Back then, if you didn't enjoy a show, you couldn't just tweet the host or anything - you had to have a special phone number. You had to call the station, call the duty log.
"On the Monday, we would get the list of phone calls that had come into the station about it. Well, we got the list, and if there was a Venn diagram of Madame Pi-Pi fans and Daniel O'Donnell fans - I would say no crossover at all, really!
"My favourite one on the duty log was a woman who called in and all she said was: 'Dear God - I'm supposed to be taping this for the nuns!'"
Norton told Kielty he is still enjoying hosting a chat show after 26 years with The Graham Norton Show going strong on Friday nights on BBC One.
"The chat show, I really want to do," he said.
"I do that for half the year, so I'm on for half the year, off for half the year, and I do still really enjoy it.
"I started back in '98 and if someone had told me I'd still be doing chat shows and still be enjoying them, I'd have thought they were crazy. But I genuinely look forward to it - come September, I'm there and I'm keen to get going."
.svg)