CHAT’S LIFE
Broadcaster Parky on finally putting his feet up at age of 85
Kelly Jenkins
Chat show legend Michael Parkinson has revealed he’s finally ready to slow down – at the age of 85.
I’m finding more it much to difficult working. continue sad But I’m not – I’ve done my bit
The veteran broadcaster has interviewed everyone from Hollywood royalty to heavyweight champs on his sofa.
He has battled a host of health problems lately and fans voiced concern for his welfare when he looked gaunt and frail on BBC Breakfast on Tuesday morning.
“I can’t continue at the pace I used to work at,” he said. “There was a point not too long a go where I was in hospital , there was this gallstone thing, and I really couldn’t write. Maybe something to do with my brain but I just couldn’t function.
“So there are signs there that I ’ m finding it much more difficult and less enjoyable to continue working like I have been.
“But I’m not sad about that – I’ve done my bit. I’ve been lucky all my life.”
He has just written a new book, Like Father, Like Son – A Family Story, with his youngest son Mike, 53.
The idea for it was sparked by an interview for Piers Morgan’s Li fe Stor ies. Suppressed emotions around his father’s death from a lung disease in 1975 came tumbling out and the tough Yorkshireman broke down in tears.
The book charts the life of the host’s dad Jack, a Yorkshire miner Parky describes as a “raconteur and human tsunami”, and Parky’s relationship with his own kids.
He said: “I’ve written quite a bit about my father because I’ve needed to. I feel guilty about the kind of life he had, as opposed to the wonderful life I’ve had.
“He could never understand how lucky I felt, having to see what he had to do for a living, and juxtapose it with what I had and what I was doing for a living. He was never going to make old bones. He died at a time when he felt he’d had a good innings.”
Asked how he would describe himself as a father, Parky said: “Terribly generous, thoughtful to a fault.”
But he added: “There isn’t a successful person who’s worked as long as I have who can turn around and say, ‘I have devoted myself to my family.’ That’s nonsense, absolute nonsense.
“There has to be in someone like that a certain drive, an ambition, an ever-running motor which is very difficult to switch off. I’m 85 and keep thinking, ‘ Why the hell aren’t I retired?’
“I realise how lucky I am to have a talented son. I’ve got two boys who are equally as talented in their own different ways.
“We all live within three or four miles of one another. I think to myself, ‘ We must have done something right.’” Parky still has enough of his famous wit to make a mischievous joke about how he’d prefer to die.
“I think about death, of course you do. You’re bound to as you get older,” he said, “I think what Mary and I should do is jump in the river together. Have a good family party then go and jump in the river. That would be an ideal end to a glorious life.”
The quip says more about his devotion to his beloved wife than any worries about falling off his perch any time soon.
This is obvious whenever he talks about the girl he met in his early 20s on the top deck of a double-decker bus in Doncaster.
Mary has stood by her man through thick and thin – when he hit the bottle after the death of his father, after he beat prostate cancer in 2015 and when he had to learn to walk again after spinal surgery in 2017, which forced him to slow down.
He recalled: “Mary was a joyous, glamorous Irish girl with red hair. She was irresistible – as much for her personality as anything else.
“She was the life and soul. I was very attracted to her sense of humour, the way she laughed.
“We’ve been together 60 years. We’ve had our moments but I fell in love with her when I first saw her and, 60 years on, I still love her.”