‘I used to interview screen gods – now the glamour has gone’
Michael Parkinson
Michael Parkinson has always been a proud Yorkshireman, trying out for the county cricket team in his youth, refusing to soften his regional accent in the 800 episodes of his eponymous chat show that ran on BBC and ITV between 1971 and 2007, and nowadays happily appearing along with another famous local product, Sean Bean, in commercials for Yorkshire Tea. But sometimes, he admits, he can feel just a bit unloved back home.
Noting that his old cricketing friend and contemporary, Dickie Bird, later a celebrated umpire, has a statue in his honour in their home town of Barnsley, Parkinson adds spikily, “Now, come on. I haven’t got a statue.” It is said mostly in jest, but there is a spoonful of hurt mixed in there, too.
It is all about the distinction between those who stay and those who leave to find their fortune, muses the 84-year-old broadcasting legend. He falls into the second category – we are sitting in front of a log fire in the library of a hotel near his Thamesside home at Bray. Bird, by contrast, hasn’t strayed far from his birthplace.
“Dickie is still in Barnsley and they love him with a passion they don’t feel for me. People like me are seen as having deserted a sinking ship.”
This month, though, the local-ladmade-good will be returning to “God’s own county” to tour his popular theatre show where, in conversation with his son, Michael Junior, he reminisces about the big names who graced his show over the decades. “It is quite self-indulgent,” he jokes, “but recently in Australia, we had 5,000 turn up at Sydney Opera House.”
That’s quite a crowd. “I never felt daunted walking on to a TV set – the audience is part of the scenery there,” he replies. “But I do when it is a live audience in a theatre. The first time I played the Opera House [a show that evidently proved so popular that he got a repeat booking], I said to the crew, ‘If anyone switches the house lights on when I walk on stage, I will kill them.’ And, of course, they did. Oh Christ! I prefer it when the stage lights mean you can just see the first three rows. I was terrified when I looked all the way to the back of the hall.”
Heading back to Yorkshire, though – where, aged 16, he “made a clown of myself ” in a county cricket trial – there’s no such fear. There are dates scheduled in Scarborough, Halifax and Sheffield. What draws the crowds?
“There is nostalgia,” he suggests, “for a time when talk shows were about talk and not whatever they might be about today”. If this sounds like a dig at some of his successors, he is gracious about Graham Norton, the young pretender who has inherited Parky’s crown.
“You have to constantly reinvent chat shows and the only one that has worked in that sense is Graham, who has created a party – four people who have a few drinks and tell stories about each other. The old-fashioned interview is thought of as boring nowadays.”
But not, it seems, on a theatre stage when Parkinson is doing the talking.
He may move more slowly today, and his face looks a little gaunt, but he is as sharp as ever once our chat gets going.
He is reluctant to dwell for too long on whom he would invite on to a one-off “golden greats” episode of Parkinson (though eventually he does mention David Attenborough, Billy Connolly and Shirley Maclaine – “gay, in the original sense of the word”). If he could get a day pass to heaven, that list would include Peter Ustinov, Lauren Bacall plus Clive James and Jonathan Miller, both recently deceased and, for Parkinson, much missed.
He takes much longer to ponder on which of the new stars to have emerged since he retired in 2007 would pass muster. Finally, he shakes his head.
“No, I’ve done my lot,” he says. “I can’t feel what I felt for people of my generation.” It was something about the essential mystery that the stars of the era all carried with them, he says; the unknown person behind the public façade that he sought to unmask.
“In the cinema in the mining village [of Cudworth, near Barnsley] where I grew up, I used to look up to people on the screen as gods. Nowadays, all the information required about everything to do with anybody in the world is there [online]. When, on my show, I would say, ‘ladies and gentlemen, James Cagney’, the audience would know who he was because they had seen his films, but they knew nothing more about him. And suddenly he was standing there in my studio, and they had no idea that he was only 5ft 7in. In the cinema, he was 7ft high. The stars were mysterious back then in the way that people aren’t today. The glamour of it has gone.”
Not that it was always glamorous on Parkinson. Two unhappy moments in particular have gone down in legend – his tetchy exchanges with Meg Ryan in 2003, which, according to Hollywood folklore, ruined her career, and his 1975 encounter with Helen Mirren, when he was judged to have overstepped the mark by asking if her physical “equipment” had got in the way of her being taken seriously as an actor.
He doesn’t want to relive those encounters again, but recalls when Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould came on his show in 1973 and were “absolutely stoned. They just talked to each other and I got quite cross.”
But, he adds, much later Sutherland came on Desert Island Discs (Parkinson presented the Radio 4 staple between 1985 and 1988) and apologised. “He told me it was the other fellow who had made him do it.”
He dodges my question about the current Desert Island Discs host, Lauren Laverne, who is dividing its
‘I used to look up to people on the screen as gods – now the glamour of it has gone’
loyal listeners. Instead he prefers to return to his forthcoming theatre shows. They will, he points out, look back to his upbringing as the grammar school boy who escaped his working-class roots to start out as a newspaper reporter, before moving into television in Manchester.
“I just accepted that I couldn’t get a job as a doorman at the BBC, speaking the way I did. When I joined Granada in 1961 when it arrived in Manchester, its genius was to employ people who had the local accent, and so created a bond between viewer and station.”
It was a radical departure and, where it led, others followed, spiriting Parkinson to the BBC in London in 1971. He has never relocated back up north. Is he tempted now? There might even be a statue in it…
“I did go back, not too long ago,” he laments. “The village has gone. There is no reason why it should be there. It was there as a dormitory for Grimethorpe Colliery, where my father worked from the age of 12 in a dirty, cruel, nasty industry.”
He has no time for those on the left of politics who yearn for the return of labour-intensive heavy industry. “You shouldn’t get sentimental about it going, but what has not been bettered has been the communities around it. You grew up with a sense of community then, and you grew up with a sense of being a man. Now all of these [ideas] are old-fashioned.”
On his friend and fellow Yorkshireman Geoffrey Boycott – controversially awarded a knighthood in September despite a conviction for domestic violence in 1998 – Parkinson says, “I think he has paid his dues, hasn’t he? He’s learnt more sense and he’s done good work since then.”
Like Boycott and Bird, Parkinson insists he is not the type to think of declaring his innings in the face of the onslaught of ageing. “I’ve come to that point in my life,” he muses, “when people are dying around me. And me? I don’t keep on working because I don’t want to die, but because I’d prefer to die in the saddle.”