‘I was never interested in being famous’: dance legend Yvonne Rainer on her gloriously weird film career
Yvonne Rainer is the iconoclastic choreographer who, beginning in the 60s, pioneered the deconstruction of modern dance in a manner closely associated with minimalist art. No Manifesto, published in 1965 (“No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and makebelieve … no to moving or being moved”) announced a rejection of modern dance’s conventions and cliches, in favour of a vocabulary of movement that prioritised the ordinary, alienating or plain over narrative structure and emotional projection. She turned to film-making when she felt that dance alone couldn’t express what she wanted to say, and produced more than a dozen uncompromising film works over three decades.
“Oh no,” says Rainer, 88, when I bring up No Manifesto, which she later disavowed, during our conversation at her Manhattan apartment. “That was a certain point in art history – the manifesto was a way of asserting yourself publicly. I never meant it to be a doctrine that would govern my decisions.” She moved on from it “almost immediately”.
By the end of the 1960s, Rainer, whose anarchic, boundary-pushing and gloriously weird films are celebrated with an ICA retrospective this month, was looking for a new way to explore the thicket of identity, memory, emotion and politics, particularly her alignment with the feminist movement. “I didn’t feel that the kind of dancing that I did could accommodate those interests,” she says. “That’s when film entered the picture.” It helped that a mutual friend introduced her to the acclaimed French director and cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who taught her the art of film editing.
While her choreography shunned conventional narrative form, Rainer’s 1972 debut feature film, Lives of Performers (subtitled “a melodrama”), experimented with shards of storytelling. It depicts a love triangle between two women and a man, who may or may not be performers seen in a rehearsal. She dipped in and out of styles for her characters’ tangle of emotions: mime, dance, off-camera dialogue rendered teasingly flat, and tableaux vivants of performers in various poses of abjection and desire. “I gave Babette free rein to shoot rehearsal,” she says. “I was very interested in filming people just sitting around talking to each other … in combining the look of ordinary interchanges between people and then dramatic presences.”
A rebellious streak coursed throughout her subsequent films, full of ruptures and strange juxtapositions, or the soundtrack juddering out of sync with the images. She says this disruptive inclination springs from her childhood in San Francisco, as the only daughter of political radicals Jeanette and Joseph. “Nominally, they were anarchists,” she says of her parents. “But they were conservative in a lot of ways,” with strict expectations when it came to her behaviour and boyfriends. “There were these contradictions that I became aware of and used when I was trying to separate myself from my parents,” she says.
The separation came in the shape of a relationship with the abstract expressionist painter Al Held, when she was 20. A year later, she moved with him to New York, to a loft on 21st Street and 5th Avenue, where she immersed herself in the art scene. Enamoured with Held, his painting and a new city, Rainer tried her hand at acting (“I was no good at it”) and then dance classes, with the choreographer Edith Stephen. “I was strong and I loved moving around,” she says, but she was not a classical ballerina: she had short legs and a long torso; in childhood acrobatics classes, she had been ungainly rather than graceful. She studied for a year under the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham at her famed studio, the bastion of modern dance. “Structurally, I was not made for that technique, but I learned a lot,” she says. “I realised very early that I would have to make my own dances if I was to become a professional.”
By the early 60s, Rainer had helped to found a now-legendary experimental collective, the avant garde Judson Dance Theater. It was part of a wave of New York artists dissecting and rejecting the establishment, eschewing affectation and grandness in favour of repetition, indeterminacy, the movements of the mundane and everyday. “We were all running to the windows and looking out at what people on the street were doing, as though we had never examined them before,” she says.
This desire to deconstruct the ordinary things going on around her mutated on screen. Rainer’s films also grew more personal and political. She continued to interrogate the medium with overlapping discordant storylines, or by splitting a character among performers – “leveraging cliche as base to life’s acid”, as the critic Natasha Stagg put it.
Some scenes feature melodramatic recitations, while others play in silence, such as the sequence from Film About a Woman Who … (1974), in which Rainer sits mute before the camera with scraps of her script glued to her face. Her films were collages of melodrama, dream images, documentary, slapstick, archival footage, polemic and loose memoir. Her final feature, Murder and Murder (1996), told the story of a midlife lesbian love affair between two academics with a 10-year age difference, a tuxedo-clad Rainer delivering a darkly comic meditation on ageing, romance and surviving breast cancer.
Rainer, who has lived with the academic Martha Gever for 30 years, said in her 2006 autobiography, Feelings Are Facts, that her films increasingly grappled with “the challenge of representing and fictionalising the inferno of my own passions”. Or, to quote her 1990 artist’s statement: “My films can be described as autobiographical fictions, untrue confessions, undermined narratives, mined documentaries, unscholarly dissertations, dialogic entertainments.”
They also got harder and harder to make. “I wasn’t about to go into traditional Hollywood-type narratives,” she says. By the mid-90s, she found it impossible to finance further experimental features, so she returned to choreography. “I never liked the process of making long films. I’m a technological idiot,” she says. “It was a relief to go back to what I loved, dealing immediately with people.” Her most recent composition, Hellzapoppin’: What About the Bees?, an exploration of racism in the US using movement based on the 1941 musical comedy of the same name, was staged in New York in 2022.
As Rainer approaches 90, she continues to look forward: to a future spin on Trio A, her most famous solo work; at the prospect of returning to a studio. Her view on past work, particularly her films, is clipped and matter-of-fact. “I don’t prescribe,” she says when asked what her work means. “I don’t expect to be on Broadway, or proselytise. I was never interested in being famous. In fact, someone described me as the most famous unknown choreographer around. And that suits me.”
• Yvonne Rainer: A Retrospective runs until 27 August at the ICA, London, with Rainer appearing for a Q&A on 17 August
but there are plenty of decent places around town. Enjoy!
Except Westworld inevitably turns out not to be so fun. As soon as someone says “There’s no way to get hurt here!” we know that things will get messy.
After a breezy pre-credits sequence advertising the park – in which visiting Westworld is described by one guest as “the realest thing I’ve ever done” – we follow the holiday of two best friends. James Brolin is cool-headed and laconic as John, who’s been to Westworld before. Richard Benjamin plays the nervous first-timer Peter, who’s impressed by the realistic androids but unimpressed by the authentic dirt and austerity of frontier town life. $1,000 a day for rock-hard beds and barely drinkable booze seems (understandably) like a poor deal.
It’s only after Peter gets threatened by a belligerent local that he begins to get his money’s worth. With John’s encouragement, Peter shoots his aggressor, and the man skids into the floor’s sawdust, as blood trickles from his punctured body. Our hero is shocked – but he’s thrilled, too.
Unluckily for Peter, the local he’s just attacked is “the Gunslinger”, a strange and nearly indestructible cowboy designed to provoke guests into gunfights. This steely figure is played by Yul Brynner, and it’s a role the actor is over-associated with. Aside from one late moment – of which more later – this is routine villainy from Brynner, as scary as he is. He’s partially reviving his character from The Magnificent Seven, and partly foreshadowing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. But Arnie was arch and sarcastic; the Gunslinger never gets a good one-liner.
As the robots begin to achieve greater sentience and deeper emotional capacity, the Gunslinger becomes obsessed by his humiliation at Peter’s hands and goes on the hunt. The film builds up to a final action sequence: an almighty cat and mouse chase around the ravaged amusement park, and into the labs and control rooms that lie below its surface.
But the descent into pure action thriller mode doesn’t mean that the film has nothing interesting to say. Nor does the fact that it doesn’t care for extended philosophical dialogues, the likes of which defined the recent Westworld TV series and sometimes bored its audience.
Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton, is fundamentally about the threat of artificial intelligence, and the film presumes that AI’s development will ultimately result in crazy robots seeking to kill people. This is the same conclusion arrived at by plenty of other movies – the Terminators, 2001: A Space Odyssey, M3gan – and it doesn’t feel particularly fresh.
What’s more interesting is Westworld’s idea of what will drive AI’s development. It’s a grim prediction, with a cold logic behind it. The androids of Westworld are so lifelike because humans want to enact their darkest impulses on to other humans, however much they suppress these latent desires. Society understands how dangerous indulging these behaviours would be for collective peace and prosperity, and so has outlawed them. But Westworld gives them somewhere to run free. It allows visitors to sleep with whomever they choose, as no sexual advance can be resisted, and it permits them to kill anyone who gets in the way of their ego trips.
This is one of the darkest visions in science-fiction cinema, far scarier than the ostensible threat of the Gunslinger. And it’s a startlingly different vision of the purposes of AI from the one we’ve grown accustomed to in contemporary life.
As we know and use it, AI doesn’t cater to our darkest and most recessive impulses. Rather, it engages with our most generic behaviour. It absorbs our most common forms of socially acceptable expression and emotion and imitates this. The “generative AI” that produces new things (ChatGPT, for example), works by aggregating generic examples of human made “stuff”, and then amalgamating and reshaping it into more “stuff” – stuff that is technically new, but generally soulless.
The contrast of this AI art with the original creations of Westworld – who are violent, lusty, hysterical and obsessive – couldn’t be more pronounced. There is something darkly invigorating in Westworld’s bleakness, though. It has the kind of unpalatable grit we demand from art, and don’t get from AI, as it floats ideas about human nature we’d rather not countenance.
And if the androids reflect humanity’s dark subconscious, then they’ve picked up some of its vulnerability, too. It’s there in a moment during the film’s final chase, when Brynner’s Gunslinger furrows his brow straining to see Peter’s warm body hiding behind a flaming lamp. He’s confused and distressed by the mess the overlapping heat signals are making in his vision. He doesn’t trust himself to see the world properly, and for a moment he’s oddly sympathetic. AI might never seem this pathetically human again.
hosted Orson Welles, Bing Crosby, Michael Caine, Tony Curtis, Bob Hope, Peter Sellers, Lauren Bacall, Richard Burton – a lineup that would have thrilled any US-based station. At a time when an ex-Beatle was media gold, John Lennon guested in 1972, although only if Parkinson wore a sack. (A stipulation, apparently, of Yoko Ono.)
The introduction, in 1969, of the supersonic jet Concorde, which more than halved the length of flights from New York to London, had vastly increased the availability of American stars to UK television, making it feasible to come to England from the states for a day or so. In 1971-72, guests were paid a flat rate of £500 (the equivalent of about £7,000 now), although some negotiated higher fees. Orson Welles, a hero to Parkinson and Drewett for directing Citizen Kane and acting in The Third Man, demanded £2,000 (about £30,000 today) handed over in bank notes at the airport in London.
Crucially, though, superstars were lured to the studio by the knowledge, passed around by word of mouth, that they would get a serious hearing from an interviewer who would be deeply familiar with their work, either from personal immersion or researchers’ briefs. Another essential quality of the programme, encouraged by Drewett, was that, in further contradiction of British TV’s siloed style, guests were inventively mixed and mismatched. Except for intermittent editions where producers or interviewees preferred solo slots, the policy, again American influenced, was that guests entered singly, but then remained, allowing a final group round.
Emblematically, a 1980 episode featured Kojak actor Telly Savalas; Sir John Hackett, a former British army and Nato general, and actor Ingrid Bergman, star of Casablanca, one of the movies that had triggered Parkinson’s passion for Hollywood. Among the ecletic lineups the host himself was most likely to have relished was a 1977 pairing of James Stewart, star of It’s a Wonderful Life and The Philadelphia Story, with Geoffrey Boycott, Yorkshire’s greatest cricketer, at least until the recent career of Joe Root. The football manager Brian Clough and the mime artist Marcel Marceau were another unlikely pairing, even though the Frenchman’s willingness to speak rather than gesture somewhat reduced the surrealism.
Perhaps most startling, though, was a 1972 edition with George Best, the most famous British footballer of the time, alongside poet Sir John Betjeman. That was the rough equivalent now of Marcus Rashford appearing with Carol Ann Duffy, a combo that even Graham Norton (the only one of Parky’s successors to match his talent and impact) would struggle to smuggle on to peaktime BBC One.
The show’s ability to get almost anyone it wanted – singer Frank Sinatra and cricketer Sir Donald Bradman were the only rejections Parky resented – was the result of its impressive past guest list, a standard set by Ali’s first appearance, during the first season in 1971.
Ali proved to be the ideal Parkinson guest. Physically beautiful and radiating power and grace, the boxer magnetically drew viewers’ eyes towards him. Though his formal education was limited, Ali possessed wit, intelligence and verbal fluency possessed by few: a writer’s mind in a fighter’s body. Despite Auden’s and Betjeman’s appearances, the show’s most electrifying poetry recitations were Ali’s freestyle, rhyming verses: on that first appearance, he delivered from memory an epic about his upcoming opponent Joe Frazier.
Including a satellite link-up with the Dick Cavett show in New York (an acknowledgment of the origins of the English series), Ali was a guest four times, though never again as charismatically and lovably as on his debut. In his 2009 autobiography, Parky, noted that Ali arrived for the second recording surrounded by scowling young men, his bodyguards from the Nation of Islam organisation.
Berating miniskirted western women for “walking around with their behinds out”, Ali told the audience there was a “spiritual war” between blacks and whites”. Accusing Parkinson of trick questions (“Behind stage you’re so nice”), he warned: “You and this little TV show are nothing to Muhammad Ali.”
Despite his contentious later appearances, internal BBC research showed that Ali was one of only two guests who automatically added 2 million viewers to the show’s audience. The other was Billy Connolly, whose 15 appearances across various Parky formats gave him the guesting record.
Though sometimes lampooned for the regularity with which he spoke of his time on regional newspapers, that experience was vital to what made Parky a great interviewer. The quickjab questions that reporters were traditionally taught can unlock the core of any story – who, what, when, where, how and why? – were carried by Parky into his TV star persona. Some of the best answers he drew from Ali, along with sundry politicians and novelists, came from thrusting “Why?” or “How?” into a monologue that was attempting to control the content. Also important was that, when interviewing comedians, he was willing to set up and then get out of the way of their best stories, rather than competing for punchlines himself; a tendency he deprecated in some of the later pretenders to his chair. As with many presenters of his generation, his weakness was flirtatiousness with women guests; Helen Mirren recoiled ata reference to her breasts that Parkinson later admitted was “clumsy”, but can charitably be seen as a rare misstep.
Admirers of Parkinson – and denigrators of his successors – often cited his earlier years as exemplifying a lost time when stars came to TV shows to discuss their life and work rather than plug a product. The host himself was clear-eyed about this; many of the superstars he secured in later years had a film or book out or a show on in London. Ali, before his first appearance, had flown over to promote a soft drink.
Discovering that the itinerary included a trip to a bottling factory in the home counties, producer Drewett cajoled the beverage company into allowing Ali to be diverted to the BBC for what was billed as a “short news interview.” In reality, Parkinson and a studio audience were waiting for the guest, and an hour was recorded. The difference between then and now is that Drewett was able to subvert the PR circuit in this way without legal action.
Impressionists, such as Mike Yarwood, who often graced the Saturday night schedule, had fun with Parkinson’s relative awkwardness as a TV performer, caricaturing his tendency to scratch his hair and his very 70s sideburns, and even sometimes seem perilously close to picking his nose.
By its second series, though, the show had become a schedule fixture for the BBC, although executives tried to nudge it further towards light entertainment and away from the presenter’s self-image as a newsman. This distinction was interestingly signalled by trails, recorded during camera rehearsal and screened early on Saturday evening. In these, Parky revealed that night’s lineup, from his increasingly recognisable black leather chair, wearing slacks and an open-necked-shirt rather than the sharp suit and tie in which he would later open the show. No newsreader or current affairs host would have done this, and the image subliminally acknowledged that host and guests were at some level performing in outfits.
Parkinson soon became a critical hit, except with Clive James, whose first years as Observer TV critic closely coincided with the early series. James, who would later serve among Parky’s ITV predecessors and BBC replacements, wrote reviews that provoked Parky into responding on air. James’s response was to reply in print, in 1975, that “one of the effects of television is to make frontmen over-mighty. It follows that one of the tasks of television is to remind them they are mortal”. But, as James’s fame rose, he accepted an invitation to be a guest on Parkinson, the manner in which TV has often sought to neutralise troublesome reviewers. By the time of Ali’s final appearance in 1981, James was a fan of the franchise. By this stage, there were early signs of the boxer’s neurological condition, Parkinson’s disease, a grim nominal coincidence that makes online searches for footage of the encounters distressingly complex.
If the world heavyweight champion and pioneering rhymester was the zenith of early Parkinson, the nadir was the night in 1976 when Emu, a puppet operated by the comedian Rod Hull, repeatedly attacked the presenter, supposedly humorously. Parky testily threatened to “break the neck” (and, by extension, Hull’s arm) if the bird didn’t back off.
The meetings with Ali and Emu neatly represented the high and low possibilities of the talkshow format, of which the first 11 years of Parkinson remain the outstanding example in the UK. As ratings and reputation rose, the host asserted his long-held desire to run Monday to Friday, as Carson did. A BBC executive was sympathetic, but the board of governors, fearing too much Americanisation and light entertainment on BBC One, resisted. The broadcaster was backed by the National Union of Journalists, which threatened a strike because a nightly Parky would replace Tonight, a news and current affairs show. Questions were raised, including in the House of Commons, about the alleged threat of “endless interviews with Peter Ustinov” replacing war reporting. Spooked, the BBC board refused any spread beyond two shows, with a midweek edition from 1979.
It was not coincidental that a thwarted Parkinson chose this time to expand his career geographically. Unlike Frost, who for many years sustained series on both sides of the Atlantic, Parkinson never broke into the US talk market. But he achieved a parallel career in Australia, which had the advantages, during the English winter, of sun and cricket. Parky made the most of both these benefits while interviewing local figures in a Sydney version of his London show: Parkinson In
Australia ran for five long seasons from 1979-83 on ABC and then the commercial network Channel 10.
There were snobby colonialist jokes in the English media about Parky being so short of local celebrity cultural figures he would have to resort to interviewing kangaroos. But, in fact, the Australian version started out more highbrow than English predecessor. The first guest was the great Australian ballet dancer and choreographer Robert Helpmann, who went on to make three appearances across the series, vying for frequency with Bob Hawke, then Labor party leader en route to winning the 1983 election and serving three terms as prime minister. The bookers also made canny use of UK-based stars – Clive James, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Billy Connolly – who visited Australia for family or business reasons.
Parky’s own increasing commercial interests helped to end the Australian spin-off. His experience there, and his career-long observation of Frost, had shown Parkinson a world where front-of-camera talent owned back-ofcamera equity and profits, rather than being, as at the BBC, a salaried employee.
Blocked by the BBC board from dominating the night-time TV schedule, Parkinson switched to the objective of monopolising mornings, accepting Frost’s invitation to join a consortium bidding for the first British breakfast franchise, on ITV.
In a TV culture where public service still just about held sway, contracts could be won by creative credentials rather than just the highest bidder. This was crucial to what went wrong. Frost cannily gathered broadly upmarket hosts – himself, Parky, Anna Ford, Robert Kee, Angela Rippon – who made TV regulators swoon, but who morning viewers found a tough chew with their toast.
Off-screen hirings exacerbated the mismatch. Parkinson, never unwilling to be a class warrior, complained that Good Morning Britain was staffed by young Oxbridge graduates “who could have parsed a Latin poem for you but couldn’t write a TV running order to save their lives”. (Some of these unworldly interns later became senior leaders at the BBC.)
A further calamity was that the supposedly non-commercially competitive BBC responded by creating its own morning sofa show, Breakfast Time, forcing TV-am to bring its scheduled debut forward by six months, but still being beaten to air by its rival. It was widely theorised that the BBC’s desire to take the commercial broadcaster down was motivated by the fact that several of TV-am’s founders – in addition to luring Parkinson and Rippon, ITV also lured Esther Rantzen, who later changed her mind – had left the corporation with the potential to achieve the sort of income and equity BBC lifers could only envy.
However, TV-am did not thrive. Able to move easily between hard news and soft chat, Parkinson fared better in reviews and viewer focus groups than Ford, Frost and Kee, who were judged to be too Open University. Ratings plummeted, and, amid recurrent reshuffles on air and in the boardroom, Parkinson was shifted to weekends. He wound up co-hosting a show with his wife, Mary (an accomplished broadcaster for ITV), which set the template for future couple presenting duos, such as Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, and Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford.
Almost all of TV-am’s original stars were gone by 1984. ExtendingParkinson’s bad luck with puppets, the station was saved by children’s entertainer Roland Rat , and introduced to a range of younger talent including Nick Owen and Anne Diamond who, in a small legacy for the Parkinsons, any viewers assumed were a couple (although they weren’t). Another consolation was that Parkinson’s TVam shares ultimately proved lucrative.
There followed a decade and a half that media journalists sometimes (debatably) called Parky’s “wilderness years”. It’s true that only one project in this period made use of his primary televisual skill – Parkinson One to One (ITV, 1987-88). Parky’s second British talkshow was produced, with considerable autobiographical significance, by Yorkshire TV. These 47-minute (the commercial TV hour) chats included Elton John, Cliff Richard and, inevitably, Billy Connolly, although casting all 15 shows with white men illustrated the extent to which his precociously diverse first show had been helped by its focus on American figures.
Elsewhere, though, the presenter remained visibly busy, hosting Give Us a Clue on ITV from 1984 to 1992, a gameshow version of charades; and Going for a Song on BBC One from 1995 to – 99, a quizshow about antiques. Essentially, more likely through hiring opportunities than desire, he was moving both feet into light entertainment.
But this lighter style of TV brought his darkest moment: Ghostwatch (BBC, 1992) was a horror drama written by Stephen Volk, using the form of a mock live broadcast, co-hosted by Parkinson, from a reputedly haunted house. In one scene, Parkinson himself appeared to became possessed by a spirit, a moment so unlikely that it might have been seen to emphasise the fictional nature of the show.
However, a teenage viewer with learning disabilities subsequently killed himself, leaving a note that seemed to attribute his distress to having taken the transmission for reality. The broadcasting regulator ruled that the BBC should have labelled the show clearly as fiction, rejecting the defence that this would have ruined its impact as a mockumentary. Parkinson, who had no influence on the form or promotion of the show, was not held personally responsible in any way, but the incident helped to encourage the view that he was making do with lesser projects than in his heyday.
During this second act of his public career, he also resumed coverage of sport, for the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and BBC Radio 5 Live. Parkinson’s view of sport was, like his enthusiasm for movies, inherently nostalgic. Sidney “Skinner” Normanton, a coalminer and hard-tackling “wing-half” (itself a forgotten position) for Barnsley FC from 1947-54, was always his benchmark for sporting authenticity. His other perfect subject was Ali, who Parkinson showed a special insight into when writing about the boxer’s long decline until his death in 2016.
Some best of compilations from his chatshow’s 1971-82 run led to a second BBC One series of Parkinson, on Saturday nights, from January 1998. The first return show featured regular guest Connolly, but the guest list was later refreshed by Hollywood stars such as Madonna and Will Smith. George Michael also appeared, giving his substantial interview since he was arrested in 1998
by vice police in a public lavatory in Los Angeles, giving Parkinson another news scoop. His comeback wasn’t flawless, though as athere was another Mirren-like mishap, in 2003, when Meg Ryan cut short an excruciatingly awkward interview about her erotic thriller In The Cut.
After six successful years, the presenter fell out with the network again, with a disagreement over moving his show to a later start time to accommodate the return of Match of the Day (ITV had briefly poached football) to BBC One. Perhaps finding football stars of that time to lack the standards of Skinner Normanton, Parky transferred himself to the Saturday night ITV slot just vacated by the football.
On this ITV incarnation of Parkinson (2004 to 2007), the host who had started his career talking to stars decades older than him now had a similar age-gap with newer guests such as
Lewis Hamilton, David Cameron and Tony Blair. Blair gave the ex-reporter, then almost 70 years old, his last front page splash when he suggested that the posthumous judgment of God mattered at least as much to him as the views of voters and the media. To Parkinson’s credit, the revelation was extracted because he picked up on rather ambiguous references to “judgment” and “faith” in an answer that Blair – who had been warned against “doing God” by his press secretary, Alastair Campbell
– was trying to keep vague. The final guest on ITV – and of Parkinson’s chatshow career, was, almost inevitably, Connolly, the only person to have appeared in all the English and Australian iterations of the franchise.
Parky was arguably always, at some level, an under-the-radar arts presenter, and he went on to embrace the category officially by hosting Parkinson: Masterclass (Sky Arts, 2012-14), in which guests including actor Simon Russell Beale and dancer Akram Khan explained their craft.
In 2021, the BBC marked a the anniversary of the original series with Parkinson At 50, in which the presenter picked his favourite BBC moments. Inevitably, the encounters with Ali stood out. The boxer told the interviewer how important it was for him to be remembered as “the greatest”. Michael Parkinson never demanded that title for himself among British talkshow hosts, but he certainly earned it and is unlikely ever to be defeated.