Michael Parkinson, who has died at the age of 88, didn’t do “touchy feely” and would have a made terrible guest on his own show. But there will never be a better broadcaster, writes Mick Brown.
On any given Saturday night in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there was one man for whom the nation would turn on their televisions in search of entertainment, illumination, gossip and a measure of jollity.
With his Beatle-esque hairstyle, wide-collared shirts, kipper ties – and sometimes in the spirit of the day, a medallion – Michael Parkinson, whose show Parkinson ran from 1971 to 1982, was the chat-show host nonpareil – the master of a format which he single-handedly came to define on British television, and which nobody who followed him could ever properly emulate.
Before Parkinson, in the 1960s the pre-eminent interviewer on television was John Freeman, who in his programme Face to Face adopted a mercilessly forensic approach, which once reduced the famously irascible broadcaster Gilbert Harding to tears.
After Parkinson came the likes of Russell Harty, Jonathan Ross and most recently Graham Norton. But as brilliant as Norton may be, his programme is far from being a chat show in the traditional sense – it is a plug show, a gathering of guests spinning gags with no jeopardy at stake.
Parkinson was a journalist before he was a television personality, and he had a particular facility for putting his guests at ease, asking the right questions and eliciting revealing answers – even if his manner could sometimes border on the obsequious, not least when he was entertaining ageing Hollywood stars and personal heroes such as Betty Davis, Gene Kelly and John Wayne.
When Orson Welles appeared on his show, Parkinson told him he would call him “Mr Welles out of respect for his great talent”. Welles retorted that “I’d say you were talking bullshit.” Parkinson addressed him as Orson from then on.
“Soft” was a criticism that was sometimes directed at Parkinson (and a particularly wounding one). But his guests also include such diverse, and more challenging, figures such as Harold Wilson, Jonathan Miller, Jacob Bronowski, the writer and presenter of the documentary series The Ascent of Man, offering the prospect of depth, insight, at times disagreement and even controversy. His exchanges with Muhammad Ali on the subject of Ali’s views on racial separation made headline news.
He could have a more difficult time with women. His interview in 1975 with the young Helen Mirren dwelt at excruciatingly embarrassing length on Mirren’s appearance and having appeared nude in films, with Parkinson asking whether as “in quotes, a serious actress” her “equipment” had undermined her credibility. “Serious actresses can’t have big bosoms, is that what you mean?” a clearly irritated Mirren replied. Years later she would describe Parkinson as “a f****** sexist old fart.”
“I could flirt outrageously with people who came on the show, and it was all part of the fun,” Parkinson told me when I interviewed him in 2020, adding “You’re more constricted now.” The tone was markedly regretful.
It was a daunting experience to interview the doyen of television interviewers. For all his affable and emollient television persona, Parkinson could be famously tetchy and abrasive in person, embodying a trait also evident in his fellow Yorkshiremen – and friends – Brian Clough, Geoff Boycott and Dicky Bird, who has revealed to the Telegraph that he spoke to Parkinson shortly before he died. (“We shed a few tears and I said to keep going mate,” he said. “Those were my last words to him: ‘Keep going, keep fighting’ and I’ll ring you again. And that was it.”)
Indeed, in his newspaper columns Parkinson could often veer towards playing the part of the professional Yorkshireman, harping on his humble origins as the son of a coal miner, his love for Barnsley football club and its legendary “hardman”, a miner named Skinner Normanton, and his abiding regret of never having played for the Yorkshire county cricket team – all written for a handsome fee from his agreeable home in Berkshire.
Oddly, for someone who had been a journalist himself, he could be particularly brusque with anyone assigned the task of interviewing him. (He would have been a difficult guest on his own show.) Some years before meeting him in person I had spoken to him on the telephone, seeking a quote for a story. His irritation at receiving the call – “who gave you my number?” – was palpable and after two minutes he got shot of me.
But in old age, snowy-haired and frail, he presented an altogether more genial, benign figure – if still prone to flashes of irritation. I had come across an interview he gave to Club, a men’s magazine, in 1971 when he was 36 and had just started his television show, and which provided a fascinating insight into the driven young Parkinson. “I’m not in this business to have my name engraved on a tombstone as a very good television performer,” he told the journalist. “I’m in it for the money, and the way to make heavy bread in television is to get your own show.”
Heavy bread? Parkinson winced when I read that back to him. “The jargon of the day…” he said stiffly.
He came across as rather... brash, I suggested. He bridled at the word. “Overtly ambitious might be a better way of putting it. I was determined to make a success of it and to change my life, and the life of people around me. I had no idea where I was going – I hadn’t got a clue. I was a different person then.”
When we met, he had just published a book, Like Father, Like Son, co-written with the youngest of his three sons, Mike. In the book he recounted an anecdote about having appeared on Piers Morgan’s television show Life Stories in 2019. Asked by Morgan about the death of his father, John William, in 1977, he described seeing his father’s lifeless body being carried down the stairs of the family home in a body bag, “like a parcel”.
Parkinson wrote that he had never been renowned as a relationship counsellor – there was not much call for them in the Yorkshire mining village of Cudworth where he grew up, “or indeed Yorkshire”. Nor, he wrote, was he “very adept or comfortable with the touchy feely side of life”. Crying in public on a national television show was “a definite no-no”, and it had never been his ambition as an interviewer to elicit what he called sardonically “the Holy Grail of the celebrity sob”.
In his years as a chat show host, interviewing more than 2000 of the world’s most famous people, he told me, he could recall only one occasion when a guest was reduced to tears – the comedian Bob Monkhouse, talking about his son Gary, who had cerebral palsy. “If I ever got to that stage where somebody broke down and cried,” he said, “I’d be very embarrassed on their behalf.”
So there was no one more taken aback than Parkinson that, in recalling his father’s death on Morgan’s show, he should have broken down in tears himself. “It surprised me,” he told me. “Because I knew what he [Morgan] was after, and being old to the game I’d prepared for it. What was fascinating to me, and still is, is that so many years after my father died there is still something lurking inside me, like some illness, that came out – and I don’t know from where.”
The subject of family was a particularly complicated and emotional one for Parkinson. His mother had been a powerful, sometimes overbearing, figure and it was to his father that he turned for affection. In the book, Mike wrote that for much of his childhood Parkinson was a figure who inspired “disquiet and anxiety”, and who would appear only at mealtimes, issuing “diktats and less-than-complimentary observations on length of hair, performance at school and sporting prowess”, creating “a charged and unpleasant atmosphere” in the home. “I was not terrorised by him. I just found him forbidding and distant.”
When I asked Parkinson whether he realised the unhappiness he’d caused his family, he replied that he’d been “too drunk to realise”, immersed in a period of unhappiness and instability which, looking back, he attributed to the death of his father.
Had his father, I asked, ever told him he loved him? He shot me a look – a sissy Southerner’s question. “Not in those terms. Not with a string quartet playing in the background. But I knew he loved me. He didn’t need to tell me that really. I never doubted that for a moment.”
I asked Mike the same question. He replied “No”, but added that later in life Parkinson had become more… Parkinson interrupted his son with a laugh. “Amorous…” “Much more comfortable in his own ability to express his emotions… He’s become much more mellow.”
Parkinson told me he had conquered his drinking by moving to Australia – “Yorkshire in the sun”, as he put it – and building a second chapter of his career. He later came back to Britain, doing a chat show for ITV, which never had quite the impact of the original Michael Parkinson. The time for the kind of show that he had pioneered had passed. There would never be another Parky, and there never will be.